Property, Education and Identity in Late Eighteenth-Century Fiction: The Heroine of Disinterest

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Property, Education, and Identity in Late Eighteenth-Century Fiction

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Property, Education, and Identity in Late Eighteenth-Century Fiction Heroines of Disinterest Virginia H. Cope

© Virginia H. Cope 2009 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identiﬁed as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries ISBN-13: 978-0-230-22023-2 ISBN-10: 0-230-22023-1

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Contents Acknowledgements

viii

Introduction

1

1

Feminizing Disinterest

20

2

Burney’s Heroines of Disinterest

39

3

Strategic Disavowals in A Simple Story

65

4

Gothic Properties

86

5

Property Recollected in Tranquility

116

Conclusion: Austenian Disinterest

139

Notes

148

Bibliography

166

Index

176

vii

Acknowledgements This book has been in the works since before my children were born, so to them I owe a great debt, both for their patience and the joy they have given me over the years. Without the friendship and intellectual guidance of my colleague Roxann Wheeler, I would never have finished this project, so to her many thanks are due. She read more drafts of this manuscript than any one person should ever endure. Leslie Cohen and Antoinette Falco supplied invaluable advice and support both personal and professional over these many years, and to them I owe more than I can ever repay. I am deeply indebted as well to Elizabeth Outka for her careful readings of my work in its many iterations, from seminar paper through dissertation and manuscript, and for hours of commiseration on the challenges of balancing work and family life. Stephanie Brown’s counsel kept me sane, and her careful and timely editing, along with that of Tara McGann, saved the day innumerable times. To the professional guidance of my Ohio State colleagues Frank Donoghue, David Brewer, and Marlene Longenecker, I am also deeply indebted. Finally, I owe a special thanks to Patricia Meyer Spacks for encouraging me to pursue this project originally and providing invaluable guidance over the years, as well as to Cynthia Wall for her assistance. Chapter 2 reworks material that originally appeared in Eighteenth Century Fiction, and I thank the journal for permission to reprint. Cover art: The cover image, John Hoppner’s “The Ladies Sarah and Catherine Bligh,” is copyrighted by The Frick Collection, New York.

viii

Introduction

Proprietorship shaped identity in premodern Britain. Land ownership determined rights, duties, wealth, and status; consequently, it signified who one was or could be. In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century, however, property and identity lost their grounding—literally. Along with the eclipse of land ownership as the main arbiter of status, political transformations and commercialization expanded the opportunities for wealth creation and upward mobility, thereby broadening the range of identities a person could conceivably inhabit and bringing into existence such impalpable possessions as copyright, patents, stocks, debt shares, and commercial agreements. The consumer revolution contributed by supplying markers of status to those not to the manor born, even as the enormously expanded but unstable system of debt and credit put such achievements at constant risk, as the South Sea Bubble disaster attested.1 The emergence of “much more variegated, intangible, and peculiar forms” of property, unattached to the web of obligations associated with land, also disrupted the constitutive link between proprietorship and subjectivity, as John Brewer and Susan Staves argue. We associate “different entitlements to property or the ownership of different kinds of property” with different sorts of people, they note, providing examples that could supply the (male) character list for many early British novels: “the confident, perhaps presuming heir of primogeniture in contrast to the worried, perhaps envious, younger brother; or the independent-minded, public-spirited landowner in contrast to the servile, self-interested city lawyer or stockbroker.”2 Consequently, not only novelists but 1

2 Property, Education, and Identity

moralists, journalists, and other commentators of the early modern period were “exquisitely conscious not only of the emergence of new forms of property like stocks or government paper, but also of new sorts of persons, perhaps most notably the new men of commerce and money” who threatened the dominance of what in turn came to be known as the landed interest.3 By the early eighteenth century, property no longer inevitably denoted acreage, and the landed estate no longer delimited the possibilities of character. Indeed, character increasingly was construed as the product of education and effort rather than inheritance. Partly in consequence, education itself came to be treated as a “near relation” to property, as Frances Ferguson argues, an investment in intellectual goods that would reap high rates of interest: “a good education may not be the exact equivalent of property, but the suggestion [in modern thought] is that property is—or will be—its manifestation.”4 As property took on immaterial form, so did personal identity: One owned not only one’s self and one’s effort (through John Locke’s labor theory) but one’s ideas (intellectual property), one’s experiences (through empiricism), one’s reputation (creditworthiness or, for women, chastity), and even one’s hopes (promises, contracts, and birthright). It could be said that property and identity, because freed from their mutually constitutive relations, were both in need of “heroic acts of reification,” in Robert W. Gordon’s phrase, to again be imagined as stable, and it is a truism that the early novel contributed to that stabilization.5 Eighteenth-century fiction breathed life into the modern concept of character as being independent of property relations. Novels charting self-development, privileging the workings of private consciousness, act out the modern ideal of self as internal rather than external, worth rather than birth—a function of character, not status, and consequently dynamic rather than fixed, earned rather than inherited. Eighteenth-century fiction is also credited, less triumphantly, with bringing into being another kind of “new person,” an ideal woman constructed out of a dichotomized concept of gender: “the modern wisdom that there are not one but two sexes; that they are biologically distinct and therefore incommensurable; and that they are defined not by behavior, which is variable, but by nature, which is not.”6 Michael McKeon, among many others, considers this gender essentialism as an alarmed response to the loosening up of socioeconomic identity that assisted the rise of class

Introduction 3

affiliations, describing “the difference between men and women, and the difference between class and class, as overlapping regimes that jointly render the modern system systematic.”7 If status could no longer be essentialized, femininity could. It is telling that Brewer and Staves’ list of modern character types includes none identifiably female, for the “domestic woman” was defined by her absolute opposition to competitive, market-based masculinity, in both McKeon’s and Nancy Armstrong’s well-known analyses. Allocating the domestic sphere to women and the economic to men opened up a space for imagining identity in terms of qualities of mind rather than status, as well as for the rise of the middle class, in Armstrong’s argument.8 Admired for her altruism and household skills rather than her fortune or birth, such a woman provided diverse social groups with a common object of desire and, in fictions of courtship, a model for class ascent. In this reading, the domestic woman’s power depends upon her confinement within the supposedly depoliticized home, in which she complements her husband’s role in the competitive marketplace with her frugality and tasteful consumption. The ideal presupposes that the perfect wife is “not of necessity attracted to material things”—capable of an expansive disinterest paradoxically figured as both natural and the product of careful tutelage.9 The conduct books provided the grammar for this new female subjectivity, but it was the early novel that wrote the ideology into being, Armstrong contends, a reading that has launched a thousand academic ships. Bolstered by Armstrong’s seminal analysis, feminist and other scholars regard the disinterest of the eighteenth-century heroine as a convention, regrettable for aesthetic and political reasons. The selfless heroine who inevitably dominates the novel after Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740) seems to represent a failure of imagination, an obscured history of bourgeois triumph, or, at worst, a Trojan horse for an oppressive ideology. While it is inarguable that the feminization of disinterest supported women’s disempowerment, I would like to draw upon Helen Thompson’s cogent analysis in Ingenuous Subjection to move beyond that well-established point. Thompson argues that critics’ distaste for heroines’ apparent tolerance of patriarchy and tendency to privilege modern forms of resistance have hindered our understanding of the domestic novel. Indeed, she contends, “our position as readers who do want [heroines such as Frances Burney’s] Evelina to violate


the norms that constrain her marks one of the most compelling historical and methodological challenges facing our ongoing feminist assessment of the eighteenth-century novel.”10 To recover, like Thompson, other forms of agency not immediately recognizable to the modern reader, this book places female selflessness within the intellectual history of disinterest. Doing so reveals the important cultural work performed by the feminization of disinterest, beyond that of justifying female submission. Disinterest, the linchpin of civic virtue in the classical tradition, was under assault in the early modern period. From Hobbes onward, theories developed that posited self-interest as the driving force of human nature and consequently of economic and political regulation, concepts that rendered disinterest as impossible, insidious, or, most damningly, irrelevant. When placed within this context, the reconstitution of disinterest emerges as an extraordinary ideological reversal. The feminization of disinterest naturalized a previously unthinkable idea: that the ability to comprehend the greater good, rising above personal and particularly economic concerns, is born out of suffering and economic uncertainty—the province of women rather than of aristocratic men. Even more remarkably, we can see in hindsight that feminizing disinterest preserved the virtue as a human possibility by isolating it, like the domestic woman, in the home. In freeing disinterest from its association with stable wealth, the transvaluation saved the ancient virtue from extinction while also, I contend, granting the private self both agency and moral power. The feminization of disinterest, I will demonstrate, provided a bridge to the modern ideal of the self as divorced from property relations. This book tracks the evolving interplay between subjectivity and disinterest by tracking a character type I call the Heroine of Disinterest in the plotline in which she most often figures: stories that turn upon a contested inheritance. Spanning from Charlotte Lennox’s Female Quixote (1752) to Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), novels concerning female inheritance feature protagonists who refuse to calculate value in monetary terms but demonstrate a keen sensitivity to familial obligations, including the paramount duty of instructional receptivity. Their filial piety, altruism, and educational propriety are ultimately rewarded financially, typically both through marriage and the restoration of their obscured or threatened status or inheritance.

Introduction 5

As this plot summary no doubt recalls, the restored inheritance, like female selflessness, is a convention that has been considered both clichéd and politically suspect. The late-arriving bequest, after all, restores status and wealth to a heroine who has insistently denied interest in either. Ruth Perry, accordingly, can regard a novel like Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron (1778), with its feminized hero in the role of “the wrongfully disinherited child who eventually takes his (her) rightful place,” as regrettable on two counts: for providing a “wish-fulfillment fantasy” and for “reinscrib[ing] and naturaliz[ing] the entitlements of class.”11 Although undoubtedly suggesting an unfortunate turn toward conservatism, the concluding restoration in such novels has greater significance than such a reading suggests. Indeed, when placed within the context of the heroine’s disinterest, the plot twist emerges as an important clue to the changing ownership between property relations and self-construction. Stories of a woman either dispossessed or threatened with dispossession, yet resistant to the lure of wealth and status, negotiate the terms of a new understanding of disinterest and ultimately of subjectivity. The novel of female inheritance, when so understood, reveals the surprising correlation among the cultural, legal, and intellectual trends that galvanized modernity: the reconceptualization of identity as internal and self-determined; the expansion in concepts of what constituted property; and the exploration of education’s potential to transform individuals and cultures. Heroines of Disinterest operate within a transitional model of family relations, what I call the affective economy, in which material, educational, and emotional goods are exchanged between parents and children. In stories in which the heroine’s access to the family estate is denied or obscured, her worthiness to inherit is determined, paradoxically, by her unwillingness to calculate value in terms of land, money, or luxury items. Ultimately, the heroine’s selflessness and educational receptivity establish her absolute moral right to the property she has been denied, whether that estate is triumphantly bestowed (as in Frances Burney’s 1778 Evelina) or never regained (as in novels including Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa and Eliza Fenwick’s 1795 Secresy). The female character’s value, then, is determined not by the property she (may) hold, but by her attitude toward that property—by her emotional rather than her legal relation


to the family estate. The ideal proprietor, these works suggest, is one who recognizes property rights as earned rather than bequeathed while also envisioning ownership as a social relation. The novel of inheritance consequently establishes a transitional model of proprietorship that provides a bridge to the modern ideal of subjectivity. The nexus of property and personality is not an innovation of these novels, nor are misplaced bequests solely a concern for female protagonists. After all, foundling heirs were favored characters in such diverse novels as Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749) and Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764), both of which conclude with the elevation of worthy young men to their rightful estate. I draw on April London and Donna Dickenson, however, to argue that stories of contested heiresses provided a more expansive field for reconceiving the relations between ownership and identity. Representations of women were central to the century’s negotiation of “how identity is made, expressed, refined, and also, when necessary, repressed,” contends London, crediting this prominence to their existence “both as particularized characters and as points of reference for a range of concerns attaching to the relation of identity to property.”12 Because women historically lived in what Dickenson calls a “no-property world,” their proprietorship conditional and vexed, their stories were uniquely capable of negotiating the transition from ancient to modern concepts of identity.13 In novels of inheritance, I contend, the depoliticized identity of the uncertainly affiliated young woman offered a tabula rasa on which to chalk out fresh alliances among lineage, education, and estate. Women’s “no-property” position is suggested by their absence from Staves and Brewer’s list of “new people” but rendered paradoxical by their continued importance to the maintenance and transmission of property, as Dickenson notes. The Athenian housewife of Aristotle’s time, like the married woman under coverture, lacked control over personal property and custody over children, but “was expected to manage and fructify the household’s wealth, including wealth in the labour of children, for whom she was expected to make ‘the necessary sacrifices.’”14 Investigating the ways in which canonical theories exclude women from their paradigms, Dickenson seeks to recover a rationale for women’s labor, productive, reproductive and (I would add) emotional, despite their inability to own the fruits of their labor. Ultimately, however, Dickenson seeks not simply to account for the

Introduction 7

ways in which well-known theories ignore women’s lived experience but also to rethink the link between property ownership and moral and political agency. Like Dickenson, I too wish to “bridge the increasingly canyon-like divide between ‘mainstream’ political theory and feminist discourse” on women’s property rights by remapping the relations between proprietorship and subjectivity.15 To do so I investigate the complex interplay among gender, proprietorship, and identity in the late-century novel’s most popular plotline: the story of the contested heiress. I should pause to define my terms. By “contested heiress,” I mean a female protagonist whose right to property is threatened, denied, or delayed. The most common plot complication involves parental ignorance or refusal of the child’s existence or legitimacy, as in Burney’s Evelina and the second storyline of Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story (1792), or the efforts of a guardian, relative, or suitor to hide or re-route the inheritance, as in Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy, Sarah Cobbe’s Julia St. Helen; or, the Heiress of Ellisborough (1800), and Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho. While “heiress” strictly defined would only refer to the female recipient of a bequest, I use the term more broadly—as was customary at the time—to refer to a woman who is designated and recognized as the present or future recipient of property or even one presumed to have the moral right to such property. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) notes that by law an heir is so designated only after becoming entitled to property by the death of its possessor, but the term’s second definition is more encompassing: “One who possesses, or is entitled at some future time to possess, any gift, endowment, or quality in succession to another. The idea of succession is very often lost, so that the word frequently means little more than one to whom something (e.g. joy, punishment, etc.) is morally due.” The property at issue in the novel of inheritance may take the form of a marriage settlement, the familial recognition that implies access to such rewards, or a bequest from a dead relative (as in Clarissa, Burney’s Cecilia, Secresy, and Udolpho). As the list of novels suggests and critics have long contended, narrative was key to the exploration of modern forms of subjectivity. Less often noted is that the form also was uniquely capable of resolving epistemological questions raised by the investigation of disinterest, as George Levine argues. Disinterest, if defined as impartiality, implies a certain stance from which to know the world,


“a willingness to repress the aspiring, desiring, emotion-ridden self and everything merely personal, contingent, historical, material that might get in the way of acquiring knowledge,” he says.16 Accordingly, epistemology inevitably “slides into narrative” because narrative defies the imprisoning logic of rational abstraction: “it requires attention to embodied particulars and can make no universal claims.”17 It can also be argued that the quest for disinterest is itself a narrative, a story of self-abnegation and reward. It is most credible when seen in action. It is no surprise, then, that the period’s property theorists inevitably turned from abstraction to narrative in explaining the rise of a private property system, as Carol Rose demonstrates, telling tales explicating why individuals would give up the freedom presumed in the state of nature. Eighteenth-century novels of property and education, like the tales embedded in Thomas Hobbes’ and John Locke’s theories, deploy narrative to envision how propriety comes to align with proprietorship, thereby eliding the illogicality of self-abnegation. They tell the stories of ideas “not disembodied, but as actions, attitudes, assumptions, moral imperatives.”18 Recovering the interplay between proprietorship and disinterest in the early novel also opens up a new understanding of how British culture responded to dramatic changes in inheritance practices. By suggesting that women both display and create propriety, I demonstrate, novels of female inheritance rebuke the presumptions behind a pervasive new legal device that, over the course of the eighteenth century, significantly reduced well-born women’s chances of inheriting—the strict settlement. The strict settlement, made possible by technical changes in the law in the mid-seventeenth century, secured primogeniture with breathtaking new efficiency.19 By the eighteenth century, substantial landowners routinely used the device, according to H. J. Habakkuk, who estimates that half the land of England was under settlement in the middle of the century, a percentage that increases to as much as 90 percent in the nineteenth century.20 Habakkuk credits the device with enabling the build-up of “great estates” through marital property exchanges and with keeping alive aristocratic attitudes amid the assault of commercialization and capitalism. The settlement was so successful, it “tipp[ed] the balance of individual choices in favour of the maintenance of landed estates,” the natural representation of dynastic ambition.21 Without the strict

Introduction 9

settlement, English landownership and, implicitly, family relations might have taken a different course, he speculates: Landed families might have made less distinction between their sons. They might have continued, on a much more extensive scale than they in fact did, the inheritance practices of the period before 1640, and endowed their younger sons with grants of land. Thus, as one generation succeeded another, there might have been a progressive morcellement of estates, and a “mass of impoverished cadet lines.” More younger sons might have remained on the land, and fewer might have sought careers in distant countries; there might have been fewer great estates and more small owners.22 Habakkuk contemplates how the strict settlement affected younger sons and speculates that its systematic use greatly increased the size of estates. What Habakkuk conspicuously fails to consider, as Eileen Spring points out, is the consequences for women of the device, which increased their value as vessels transferring property between men but all but eliminated their prospects for inheriting land. Before legal changes made the strict settlement viable in the seventeenth century, estates had a minor but significant chance of ending up in the hands of widows or brotherless daughters, Spring estimates, because of common law dictates. Without the intervention of the strict settlement, 42 percent of women would have been heiresses, with fully 33 percent directly heirs of their fathers, Spring calculates. The new maneuver, however, all but eliminated that prospect by allowing landowners to dictate descent two generations in advance. From 1540 to 1780, only 13 percent of inheritances went either to or through women. From 1800 to 1880, only 4 percent of inheritances went to daughters.23 The strict settlement enforced primogeniture with new comprehensiveness by strategically deploying four legal devices: entails, life tenancies (similar to trusts), jointures (replacing dowries for widows), and portions (sums of money guaranteed to offspring). Typically, the alignment would be updated at the coming-of-age or marriage of the eldest male of each generation, on whom the estate ideally would already be entailed. To guarantee primogeniture, the heir would be asked to become a life tenant of his father’s property, similar to a trustee, during the negotiation of marriage settlements. This was


necessary because entails could be extended to only one succeeding generation. Accepting a life tenancy cost the heir the ability to sell the estate, but it allowed him to entail the estate anew on his own prospective son. To lessen the economic severity of the provision, the marriage settlements also dictated portions for the potential daughters and younger sons of the marriage and provided a jointure (less generous than the traditional dowry) to support the wife if she survived her husband. The estate’s preferred successor would of course be the eldest male child, but a sequence of “collateral heirs” such as nephews would also be named to exclude closer female relatives from inheriting. The collateral heir was the device’s real innovation, Spring argues, eliminating the possibility of the estate descending to daughters, under common law, if no son survived to adulthood. The timing of the negotiations was also planned to reduce the chance of a woman’s inheriting because of emotional default. By asking the son to make provisions before his children were born, the negotiations limited the dangers to estate preservation posed by “unrestrained paternal affection.”24 A father unfettered by such restrictions might well decide to break the entail, a relatively simple maneuver, rather than dispossessing his daughters in favor of a distant male relation. (We can presume, consequently, that Jane Austen’s Mr. Bennet either is entirely unaware of the ease with which entails can be broken or, more plausibly, already reduced to a life tenant and incapable of doing so). While portions for daughters rose in the eighteenth century, Spring argues that the seeming generosity was no sign of increasing affection, as Lawrence Stone suggests—it was compensation for the daughters’ dispossession in favor of a Mr. Elliot or a Mr. Collins. As Spring’s reference to paternal affection reminds us, bequests not only dictate property but structure family relationships. The strict settlement’s dramatic intervention in estate law, therefore, should be recognized as a significant factor in the reconfiguration of family dynamics in eighteenth-century Britain. Accordingly, Ruth Perry gives “the great disinheritance” large credit for the period’s disturbed kin relations, reflected in the obsession with defining family obligations and determining the proper distribution of resources. Perry considers those concerns as the inspiration for the proliferation of fantastical plots of “orphaned children with complicated relations to their guardians, secret marriages, illicit seduction, sibling rivalry, lost

Introduction 11

inheritance.”25 In her analysis, the compulsively repeated story of a daughter’s dispossession figures as “a mythic recording of a banal and literal truth: shifts in the social and economic purposes of kinship over the previous half-century resulted in a reconception of the daughter’s place in the family as temporary, partial, and burdensome.”26 The prevalence of the romance plot also reminds us that the strict settlement increased the incentive for parents to insist upon their children making “prudential marriages,” ones in which the proportions between the two households’ financial contributions were assessed with new precision.27 However, as Perry, Habakkuk, and Spring demonstrate, the device also eliminated parents’ power to modify their children’s inheritances after birth, a change that dispensed with an important disciplinary tool. Older, looser forms of settlement simply dictated the wife’s jointure, leaving fathers great discretion in deciding the scale of provision for members of their family and the succession to the estate, Habakkuk writes. “He could, for example, disinherit his children” or presumably defy the dictates of primogeniture and leave his estate to his daughter or wife.28 The anxiety created by this deprivation was intense. Particularly in families considering the device for the first time, the primary objection was the father’s loss of control, Habakkuk writes. “It is against nature to make a father subject to his child,” an eminent lawyer, Sir Heneage Finch, wrote to the aunt of his son’s potential bride, citing examples of a son who “offer[ed] to disinherit his father by treating to sell the inheritance for a song while his father lived.”29 The disruption in familial lines of power was part of the larger confusion created by the period’s new political and economic order, a disruption that fiction of the period sought to resolve. In mapping out a new political order, John Locke, Thomas Hobbes and their peers left unanswered a crucial question, as Lynn Hunt contends: how emotional exchanges should be reconfigured after the attack on absolutism. “How, for instance, was the idea of the political exclusion of women to be maintained in the absence of the old justifications of ‘natural’ family order? Would the model of the family be thrown out altogether in favor of a model based on isolated, independent, self-possessing, contracting individuals?” How, she asks, could the new economic order “be made lovable?”30 The novel of inheritance does not go so far as to make the new economic order “lovable” but instead constructs a transitional ideal


that imaginatively resolves the generational conflict it created: the affective economy, a relay of emotional and material goods dependent upon female disinterest. The alternative model of family relations that these novels rehearse defies the rigid gender ideologies of the strict settlement, I contend, as well as the atomization implicit in the capitalist imperative to pursue self-interest. An extension of ideas contained in Locke’s Second Treatise of Government, the affective economy naturalizes the transfer of property by linking it to parental and filial devotion. It lends propriety to inheritance by construing bequests as inspired by natural obligations and earned through good behavior. Heroines of Disinterest gain their property through pedagogical and emotional labor—the shaping of the individual self—in the service of the larger family order, refusing (like Clarissa) to be seduced by the possibility of becoming an economic island. They reject self-interest in favor of familial loyalty; their emotional generosity, in turn, garners material rewards. The word “propriety” is a linguistic fossil that can help us recover the mediating role of disinterest in constructing new relations between property and identity. According to the OED, in the early modern period, propriety denoted both property and fundamental character: “a private possession or estate” or “a piece of land owned or granted to someone” as well as “[p]roper or particular character; own nature, disposition, idiosyncrasy; essence, individuality.” The overlay reinforces the idea of self and property as mutually determining. Indeed, character’s basis in property was emphasized with greater urgency by civic humanists such as James Harrington, as J. G. A. Pocock famously contends. Harrington, in his revisions to republican theory, prioritizes the material over the moral bases of personality, insistently theorizing propriety (defined as “[p]roper or particular character”) as the product of landownership.31 The estate, civic humanists argued, created the psychological and material conditions necessary to produce the ideal civic leader, a man of disinterest. Assured of wealth, freed from labor, and consequently endowed with the leisure for an expansive education, the landowner could survey society and dispassionately assess the public good. Land was considered the “best foundation for personality,” not least because it was inherited—more stable, paradoxically, because unearned.32 The now-obsolete use of “propriety” to denote property or personality peaked in usage in the mid-seventeenth century. By the middle

Introduction 13

of the eighteenth century, a new meaning emerged: the modern definition of “conformity to accepted standards of behaviour or morals, esp. with regard to good manners or polite usage; seemliness, decorousness, decency; (observance of) convention.” This denotation of propriety is, of course, deeply gendered. It is women who since the nineteenth century have been imagined to adhere most rigidly to behavioral regulations. Indeed, after a 1786 reference by Robert Burns to sensibility’s disregard of propriety’s “cold cautious rules,” the remaining six quotations in the OED assign propriety to women, from Miss Leech, in Theodore Hook’s 1825 Sayings and Doings, who “curls the poodles, plays propriety when I have men parties, and rides backward in the barouche,” to Howard Jacobson’s 2003 reference to “countrywomen of unassailable propriety.” Although the use of propriety to denote property persists in legal and technical references, it otherwise dies out at the end of the eighteenth century, overtaken by references to manners.33 By the Victorian period, then, propriety had been evacuated of substance and irrevocably gendered. It no longer implied the essence of personality conceived in a constitutive relationship to proprietorship. Much has been said about the reductiveness of this notion of propriety, as well as the ideological consequences of its association with women. The feminization of propriety, however, is a crucial clue to what happened discursively between those two extremes of meaning. The internalization and privatization of subjectivity, suggested by propriety’s linguistic decoupling from proprietorship, depended on the regendering of its crucial component—disinterest. Reconstituting disinterest as the province of women freed the quality from its basis in stable wealth, I argue, and, in so doing, provided the means by which to authorize the modern self. It negotiated a place between civic humanist and liberal theories of identity. Despite the importance of the concept in early modern discourse, in modern scholarship, disinterest is a tainted and obscured ideal. The early history of disinterest has been overlooked because of its association with aesthetic theories that grew to prominence later in the century.34 Meanwhile, its logic has been undermined by its association with ideology. Disinterest is routinely dismissed as a weapon of power or a singularly dangerous fantasy, cast as the pretense but not the reality of objectivity. Pierre Bourdieu, for example, renders disinterest culpable in his description of Marxian ideology.


In his words, ideology is “the universalization of a particular interest: the ideologue is the one who posits as universal, as disinterested, that which is in accordance with their particular interest.”35 For feminists looking back on a culture dependent upon women’s disempowerment the hermeneutics of suspicion is all but irresistible and, indeed, necessary. The demand for female propriety and self-abnegation, after all, played neatly into the cultural demands for oppression, as Mary Wollstonecraft lost no time in pointing out. In Marxian as well as feminist constructions, accordingly, the critical response has been not to recover but to unmask claims of impartiality, “recogniz[ing] as such the strategies which, in universes in which people have an interest in being disinterested, tend to disguise these strategies.”36 While disinterest as a concept has been particularly insidious for women, particularly in how gendered ideals of virtue reduced even as they idealized women’s potential, it is crucial that we recover the significance of its early reconstitution for what it can tell us about gender ideology, early modern property relations, and the philosophical questions that the novel was uniquely suited to address. Disinterest may be a potential evil, but it is a necessary evil, as George Levine persuasively argues. To deny the possibility of objectivity, understood as “the capacity to be in that nowhere from which truth at last will be visible,” is to deny not only the possibility of altruism but of all apprehendable truths, contends Levine, calling it a “utopian epistemological pursuit.”37 Moreover, although absolute knowledge may be unobtainable, “there have to be some ways to decide that some things are true and some things are not … because action requires knowledge—or luck—if it is to work at all.”38 It is through narrative, he argues, that we can track the development of these justifiable beliefs, the admittedly provisional theories necessary to motivate any human action. Characters “worry out the problem” of disinterest “by embodying the abstract epistemological quest in ethically complicated lives.”39 Accordingly, he argues, “Objectivity may well have been exposed as a fraud. Much of the work it did, however, needs to be done anyway,” and it is the novel that performs that work.40 Similar to Levine, Amanda Anderson describes disinterest as an aspiration rather than a fulfillable possibility and, accordingly, a dialectic between engagement and detachment worthy of examination.41

Introduction 15

Levine and Anderson recover the workings of disinterest in the Victorian novel. This book attempts to write a prequel to their analysis, charting the changing relations among property, education, and identity by tracking the fate of the Heroine of Disinterest in late eighteenth-century fiction. The character type, previewed as early as Pamela, comes to fruition in Burney’s 1778 Evelina and appears in innumerable works in the following decade, both major and minor. In the 1790s, however, the Heroine of Disinterest comes under intense pressure from the declining faith in filial piety, alarm at the revolutionary potential of education, and the philosophical assault on the class and gender inequalities of property law.42 Radical novels of the final decade, accordingly, investigate the oppressive realities for Heroines of Disinterest in stories such as Secresy and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria (1798), reminiscent of Clarissa because more likely to end with the nominal heiress’s death than with her marriage. Even as these pessimistic works reveal the powerlessness and suffering faced by the propertyless in a capitalist economy, however, they imagine an alternative universe in which labor, both intellectual and physical, creates identity. That mental labor is represented by the workings of memory, the capacity to recall and reflect upon experience. Creative recollections are imagined as a form of self-created property, providing a powerful rubric for construing value internally, outside the gold standard of land, title, and inheritance. The trajectory of female disinterest is perhaps best tracked in an analysis of the classic self-abnegating pose of the eighteenth-century heroine: kneeling. Tellingly, the posture harks back to the feudal ritual of investiture, the ceremony in which a lord granted dominion to a vassal. In William Blackstone’s description, the ritual was initiated by the lord’s “words of gratuitous and pure donation, dedi et concessi,” meaning given and granted, and followed by the kneeling vassal’s display of devotion: Besides an oath of fealty, or profession of faith to the lord, which was the parent of our oath of allegiance, the vasal [sic] or tenant upon investiture did usually homage to his lord; openly and humbly kneeling, being ungirt, uncovered, and holding up his hands both together between those of the lord, who sate before him. And there professing that “he did become honour”: and then he received a kiss from his lord. Which ceremony was denominated


homagium, or manhood, by the feudists, from the stated form of words, devenio vester homo.43 Blackstone’s description captures the contingent and social nature of premodern proprietorship. Under feudalism, all rights ultimately descend conditionally from the king. Possession consequently is less than absolute, particularly of the quintessential estate; the act of homage testifies to that contingent status. In the ceremony establishing the continuing relations between lord and vassal, the vassal acts out humility, trust, and vulnerability, kneeling “ungirt, uncovered,” his hands pressed like a child’s within the father’s. The lord’s paternalist kiss furthers the power dynamic, even as the ritual, paradoxically, renders the vassal a man. Crucially, however, the chronology establishes the exchange as based in loyalty and faith rather than calculation: The lord gives (land) before receiving the promise or demonstration of fealty; the vassal gives (obedience, loyalty) having already received the gift. The gift is indeed “gratuitous,” meaning bestowed without “any value given in return” (OED). In the scene of investiture, the moment of possession does not establish one’s absolute dominion but one’s place in a complex web of loyalties and obligations. Feudal property rights are not contractual or natural so much as a continuing and conditional social relation, one established not just between two individuals but also between those individuals and the community. Consequently, the ritual is performed publicly: the “open and notorious delivery of possession” in the presence of witnesses seals the deal, Blackstone explains, by creating in community members “the aera [sic] of the new acquisition, at a time when the art of writing was very little known, and therefore the evidence of property was reposed in the memory of the neighbourhood” (Book 2, Ch. 4). The witnesses would be called upon in case of a disputed title to settle the conflict “by the internal testimony of their own private knowledge” (Book 2, Ch. 4). The ritual of investiture, then, gained its authority from public memory and consent. The feudal ritual, of course, was acted out between men, a rite into manhood (“homagium”) and a melding of social identity (“I become you”). Yet female characters are far more likely than male characters to kneel in the eighteenth-century novel. The posture accordingly suggests their role as mediators between feudal and modern

Introduction 17

property relations. When eighteenth-century heroines kneel before their fathers, usually amid crises about marriage and inheritance, they are drawing on the ritual of investiture to act out their inferiority (in gender, age, and material goods) even as they signify their worthiness to receive the “gratuitous” gift of parental property. They enact the signal ritual of the affective economy, an exchange of loyalty for lucre that draws on ancient ideals even as it enables the transition to modernity. Largely disqualified as absolute owners, daughters in novels demonstrate their virtue and earn their bequests through their recognition of possession as continuously earned, dependent upon fealty to the paternal figure. Examples of such moments abound in the eighteenth-century novel. When Evelina is finally reunited with her father, she repeatedly falls to her knees, as she had earlier before the foster father who educated her. Mary Hays’ heroine in Victim of Prejudice (1799) kneels before her adoptive parent as well, suggesting that it is the receipt of educational as well as real property that inspires the sense of unbounded obligation to a “tutelary [sic] diety.”44 Richardson’s Clarissa, the early novel’s best-known contested heiress, descends to her knees numerous times, her need to submit to her parents seemingly made more urgent (and pointless) by the freedom she is presumed to have on account of her inheritance from her grandfather. Unlike her parents and siblings, she is oblivious to dominion’s thrall, and her kneeling signifies her continued fealty despite her financial ascent—a result of the autodidact’s proper affective education. The posture’s failure to persuade her relatives reveals that it is they, not she, who lack the imaginative and moral power to escape the obsessive pursuit of economic aggrandizement. These acts of homage, linked to vassalage, were symbolic acts newly charged as property relations evolved from an ideal based on hierarchy to one based on equal exchange. Gender provided the power differential that property threatened to level. In the eighteenthcentury novel, heroines carry on the legacy of feudal rights that made property continually earned, never absolute, and a sign not of independence but of honorable servitude. By the century’s end, however, when even heroines rarely kneel before their fathers, it is a clear sign of shifting relations between the generations over love, money, and educational properties. Emily St. Aubert, the heroine of The Mysteries of Udolpho, never kneels before her beloved father, and


grasps her male guardian around the knees only to prevent him from murdering her aunt. In fact, Emily’s aunt directly equates kneeling with the abandonment of individual property. When Emily urges the older woman to behave less obstreperously to the new husband who wants control over her estate, she responds emphatically: “What! would you have me submit, then, to whatever he commands—would you have me kneel down at his feet, and thank him for his cruelties? Would you have me give up my settlements?”45 Daughters rise to their feet as property relations shed the feudal vestiges that the affective economy retained through its mingling of the emotional and the material. In the nineteenth-century novel, the forgone or recovered inheritance becomes masculinized in novels such as Great Expectations (1860–1). Disinterest lingers on as a noble quality in characters such as George Eliot’s Dorothea (Middlemarch, 1874), but it no longer defines female propriety or determines property rights. Indeed, scholars analyzing the bequest in the Victorian novel can say with confidence that “[d]aughters, for their part, are little concerned with matters of inheritance”46 But in the eighteenth century, the disinterested heiress was a key figure in realigning cultural concepts about identity and property. This book charts the realignment by examining the changing relations between a heroine’s education and her bequest in the eighteenth-century novel. Chapter 1, “Feminizing Disinterest,” reviews the history of disinterest in the early modern period and recovers the cultural work performed by its reconstitution as the province of women. I consider Richardson’s Pamela as a transitional character whose high-mindedness provides a model for later, less economically aware, heroines. Chapter 2, “Burney’s Heroines of Disinterest,” analyzes Burney’s first two novels as investigations of the affective economy and the role of disinterest in self-construction. While Evelina provides the purest example of the popular plot in which the disowned daughter regains her estate through displays of disinterest and devotion, Burney’s 1782 work, Cecilia, is an investigation of the possibilities for disinterest to co-exist with wealth and, in the concluding volumes, of identity to survive the loss of its material supports. Chapter 3, “Strategic Disavowals in A Simple Story,” considers Elizabeth Inchbald’s first novel as an interrogation of the affective economy and the emotional costs of disinterest. The two-generation

Introduction 19

work is a transitional text, I argue, its opposing tales of property and education reflecting the impasse faced by the novel of inheritance before it splintered into the radical and the Gothic registers. Chapter 4, “Gothic Properties,” contends that Ann Radcliffe’s female Gothic dramatized the injustices of a rigidly gendered property system but also loosened the grip of property on identity by imagining the inheritance as earned through the shrewd management of experience and memory. Chapter 5, “Property Recollected in Tranquility,” argues that the radical novels of Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, and their peers interrogate the ideological seductions of narrative forms and of disinterest, even as they retain both as ideals. They kill off the Heroine of Disinterest, the icon of the inheritance novel, to expose the implausibility of such a character’s survival in late eighteenth-century England and to reveal the role narrative paradigms play in eliding painful realities. With their idealistic heroes and heroines and their dark endings, these novels both herald and question the viability of the modern, dematerialized story of the self, in which mental property entirely trumps material goods in conferring identity. The conclusion to this book considers Jane Austen’s version of the Heroine of Disinterest. By the time Austen is writing, I argue, female disinterest was a well-established convention and no longer required the obsessive rehearsal seen in earlier works. In Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Persuasion (1817), accordingly, the heroine’s capacity for disregarding financial considerations can be taken for granted. Disinterest in Austen is represented not primarily through acts of charity or self-negation but in a characteristic attitude toward the world. Recognizing that disinterest like truth is an aspiration more often than a possibility, the quality is represented as a mental state: Anne Elliot’s continued awareness of the contingency of personal concerns and Elizabeth Bennet’s ironic detachment. Austenian irony, then, represents the culmination of disinterest understood, in Michael McKeon’s term, as freedom of mind and “an easy detachment from what pass for the affairs and interests of the great world.”47 It also signals that the cultural work of the novel of inheritance and its Heroine of Disinterest has reached completion.

1 Feminizing Disinterest

In novels written in the second half of the eighteenth century, financial savvy and female virtue seem mutually exclusive. From Charlotte Lennox’s quixotic Arabella (1752) onward, high-minded heroines either resist economic knowledge or prove incapable of deploying it. Indeed, female protagonists seem oblivious to the necessity of money even for self-preservation, believing, like Pamela, that they can live “like a Bird in Winter upon Hips and Haws, and at other times upon Pignuts, and Potatoes or Turneps, or any thing.”1 Apparently as ignorant of the pleasures of wealth as of sex, heiresses like Arabella in The Female Quixote sincerely wish the man who threatens their property “Joy of the Estate.”2 Such characters, whom I call Heroines of Disinterest, are willing to give their last pence to an impoverished Scotsman, aged widow, or repentant prostitute; they are highly sensitive to familial obligations, including the paramount duty of instructional receptivity. Remarkably, such economic selflessness outlives even sexual innocence as a compulsory female virtue. The late-century heroines of Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy (1795), Mary Wollstonecraft’s Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman (1798), and Amelia Opie’s Adeline Mowbray (1805) defy convention by having sex outside of marriage, yet their emotional and financial generosity still testify to their transcendent virtue. Equally revealing is the frequency with which novels featuring Heroines of Disinterest, from Frances Burney’s Evelina (1788) to Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), place their protagonists in an obscured relation to the family estate: a device that tests the limits of their disinterest while also allowing it to be amply rewarded with marriage and a restored inheritance. 20

Feminizing Disinterest 21

Not surprisingly, the heroine’s improbable selflessness and her equally improbable elevation have been roundly critiqued as conventional, clichéd, and conservative. Yet the link between female disinterest and the inheritance plot demands closer examination, as does the extraordinary transvaluation suggested by the association of disinterest with women—previously considered incapable of self-forgetting. In this chapter, I place the character type within the context of the early modern reconceptualization of disinterest and the popular narrative of dispossession. Doing so reveals that the feminization of disinterest played a far more important role in eighteenth-century cultural transformations than has previously been assumed. In fact, in novels in which heroines both embody the trait of feminized disinterest and contend, however indirectly, for an inheritance, we can trace a crucial moment in the transition to a dematerialized ideal of identity. Rather than contradicting the heroine’s claims of disinterest, the concluding elevation implies a system in which such disinterest operates within rather than in defiance of property relations. Scholars routinely presume that the eighteenth-century heroine’s financial and sexual ignorance signifies the firewall rising between the gendered domains of the economic and the domestic. Accordingly, they cast the concluding inheritance as the intrusion of materialism into romance or, worse, a white flag signaling a retreat to notions of a class-dependent identity. Those self-made women turn out to be manor-born, their enrichments simply deus ex machina for a secular age unwilling to commit to modern possibilities for self-shaping.3 Ruth Perry, for example, follows a long line of critics by describing the concluding elevation of “nobodies” like Evelina as a reinscription and naturalization of class and gender ideologies as well as a form of narrative wish-fulfillment.4 James Thompson speaks regretfully of Evelina as willfully ignorant of economic concerns and describes Burney’s Cecilia (1782) as a “narrative of prey and debt” in which the heroine’s vulnerability demonstrates her need for male protection and containment within the domestic sphere.5 He concludes that inheritance is “at the center and margins of the classic English novel” because of the period’s anxious interrogation of the relations between “property and life story,” but moves quickly to argue that the separate spheres ideology demanded that the plot device be repressed by the time of Austen. As part of the cultural work of “separating love


from money, private and public, political and personal, male and female worlds,” inheritance is eventually forced out of the courtship plot, he contends, because it breaches those walls: “It is at inheritance where the zone of exchange and the zone of affect meet, where love and money could be seen to touch.”6 If the restored inheritance is a confusing trace of “the teleology of property and personal development” in Austen, it can only be considered more politically and aesthetically regressive in works written later in the century.7 Accordingly, Raymond Williams regrets that George Eliot’s Felix Holt “is made to turn on the inheritance of the estate,” seeing it as a “crucial surrender” to bourgeois interests.8 But it is perhaps Jane Eyre (1847) that has been most bedeviled by criticism of the inheritance plot. The complaints echo those made about Evelina and its eighteenth-century peers: Jane’s bequest from her distant uncle reabsorbs her into the system of inheritance and primogeniture that has caused her torment, as Nancy Pell argues, while also signifying the author’s retreat into the dream world of Angria.9 Parama Roy cites the legacy, along with Jane’s religious acquiescence, as the most important factor undercutting the novel’s subversive impulses: “The astringency and power of Brontë’s crusade against the manorial ethos and its valorization of property and patriarchalism is neutralized to some degree by the astonishing somersaults of a plot that converts Jane from one of the disinherited to one of the propertied; Jane ends up rather too well-adjusted and well-endowed for Brontë to carry through her radical impulses to the end.”10 Not only does the financial elevation of heroines such as Jane undermine the social critique implied by novels charting women’s disempowerment, but critics also argue that it considerably undermines the heroines’ claims to being freed from aristocratic vices. Some scholars solve the conundrum of such plots by writing the notion of disinterest out of the story altogether, contending that it is either feigned or overcome. For example, Cynthia Klekar reads Cecilia’s attempts at philanthropy not as pure disinterest but “the result of coercion that redeems an ideology of crass economic self-interest under the heading of symbolic familial obligation and gendered authority.”11 Rachel Brownstein is among those who read Pride and Prejudice as the story of Elizabeth Bennet’s maturing into a healthy understanding of economic necessity. She appropriately covets the wealth of Pemberley—Brownstein suggests—and


consequently subdues her rebelliousness to acquire it. With “matterof-fact materialism, she sighs out her desire to have the place”!12 Despite the appeal of these critiques, much is lost if we reduce female selflessness to an unfortunate convention, spurn the inheritance plot that so captivated early English fiction writers and readers, or either cynically or admiringly cast aside the heroines’ claims of disinterest. To recover the cultural power of the eighteenth-century Heroine of Disinterest, this chapter places the type within the intellectual history of disinterest and analyzes the opening moves in this new cultural gambit through an examination of Richardson’s Pamela, which molds and tests the paradigm. The Heroine of Disinterest came into being at a time when the possibility of disinterested behavior, traditionally considered the duty of the aristocratic male, was under siege. In the civic humanist tradition, as J. G. A. Pocock has contended, disinterest was associated with men acting in their public capacities, enabled by stable wealth to rise above private concerns in discerning the overall good.13 Secure proprietorship, it was imagined, eliminated or at least calmed avarice (a vice increasingly associated with the commercial man of changeable prospects) and consequently created leaders. It also enabled the ideal education, providing the leisure for self-cultivation. Accordingly, a 1740 tribute to naval hero Robert Blake attributes the adoration of his sailors to his “unparallelled Disinterest,” citing his disdain for the gold chains, diamond rings, and medals with which Parliament heaped him by explaining that he “was a man who seemed to be animated by no Spirit but that of the Publick.” In a decidedly unmodern fashion, the writer praises the general for not improving his estate and dying “little richer than his father left him despite many opportunities to enrich himself.”14 Similarly, in The Englishman, Richard Steele notes that his critics dwell primarily on his “Birth, Education, and Fortune” in casting doubt on his ability to make political pronouncements. He quotes an attacker heatedly contending that he cannot comment or act with disinterest because of his financial indebtedness: “Where is the publick Spirit of such a man who will be bribed to recommend a Barber, a Buffoon, or a Perfumer to the World … Where is his Disinterest who votes for more than double an Equivalent of the Stamp-Office?”15 In the early modern period, however, the civic humanist ideal of disinterest was gradually effaced by the “language of the interests.”


The seventeenth century’s political and economic revolutions made manifest “an entire, heretofore unacknowledged spectrum of needs and wants,” as Michael McKeon demonstrates, uncovering apparently irreconcilable conflicts between kings and subjects, families and individuals, and religious, economic, and political factions.16 Convinced that moral philosophy and religious precept could no longer direct and restrain human behavior, philosophers developed new concepts of social functioning, embracing rather than condemning self-interest. Theorists initially spoke of passions rather than interests, arguing that virtuous passions could be pitted against vicious ones to serve the greater good, as Albert Hirschman argues. Hobbes’ social contract doctrine is an offshoot of the countervailing passions theory. Trying to imagine why naturally ambitious human beings would subdue their desire for “riches, glory, and dominion” to found a state, Hobbes argues that they would do so to serve longer-term ambitions, such as survival and the desire “of such things as are necessary to commodious living; and a Hope by their Industry to obtain them.”17 David Hume fully articulates the idea of passion as improving a world run on interest alone, Hirschman contends, when he claims that “we can only cure one vice by another,” and should accordingly choose “luxury”—the vice less pernicious to society—over “sloth.”18 When Adam Smith transformed the passion of avarice into the more neutral “interests” and described selfinterest as the key to social and economic functioning, Hirschman argues, it was a landmark in the justification of a capitalist economy, the culmination of the drive to reconceptualize money-seeking as the primary human motivation and one seen not as distasteful and destructive but as necessary.19 What Hirschman does not note directly is that Smith’s doctrine also eliminated the social necessity or human potential for disinterest. In a commercializing economy in need of justification and explication, theories of the interests offered a comfortingly universal explanation of motivation.20 Yet as the outraged response to Mandeville and Hobbes suggested, that comfort came at a cost. Theories valorizing self-interest deeply threatened traditional ideas of morality, rendering such ancient values as “sincerity and disinterestedness and virtue … not as rare but as non-existent—as empty terms that correspond to no actual behaviors.”21 Indeed, disinterest now assumed the role of the villain or a force of disorder: For La


Rochefoucauld, disinterested conduct was conceivable but the quality was impossible to recognize, even in one’s self. Consequently, the concept served only as a mask for its evil twin: “Self-interest speaks all sorts of languages and plays all sorts of roles, even that of disinterestedness,” he wrote.22 Madame de Pompadour noted the comfort provided by theories of universal self-interest even as she joined La Rochefoucauld’s cynicism: “I cannot see the Justice of the Opinion, that it is hard to know the human Heart. One may, I think, lately suppose, that all men Covet, or desire to have, a good Fortune, Honours, Reputation, Authority, sincere Friends, a virtuous Wife, an agreeable Mistress, handsome Children, Birth, a good Figure, Wit, Talent, Health; and, as lately pronounce, that whoever, by his Discourses or Actions, aims at persuading the World of his Disinterestedness in those Points, is a Hypocrite or a Fool,” she writes in Advice to a Female Friend.23 For Sir James Steuart, the more frightening prospect was of subjects freed from enslavement to their passions: Were “a people to become quite disinterested: there would be no possibility of governing them. Everyone might consider the interest of his country in a different light, and many join in the ruin of it, by endeavoring to promote its advantages.”24 In this tradition, we also have the Mandevillian claim by which the public good is the sum of all private interests, acts of goodness are themselves disguised self-interest, and leaders’ demands for their subjects’ self-restraint are self-serving, since if they “preach up Publick-spiritedness” they can “reap the Fruits of the Labour and Self-denial of others, and at the same time indulge their own Appetites with less disturbance.”25 Disinterest demanded rescue, both because it remained a resonant ideal of virtue and because it was inextricably linked with “how one contains, manages, and guides subjectivity”—the signal question of the early modern period.26 Mary Poovey and Michael McKeon both argue that disinterest became reconceptualized in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in response to the emergence of civil society and new theories of subjectivity. Whereas disinterest had previously been associated with the sovereign’s ability to conceive of the public interest, the word subtly changed in meaning, becoming something more democratic: “a mode of judgment that contemporaries conceived of as ‘public’ because of its powers of generalization, its capacity to rise above the local and ‘private’ conditions in which


knowledge germinates to establish what might justly be called a realm of dependably common knowledge.”27 Disinterest, then, both enforced the separation of public from private and, by imagining private individuals as capable of such judgment, designated the individual as the potential repository of wisdom.28 The relocation of disinterest from sovereign to subject was part of the larger reconception of authority “as a derivation not from on high but from below,” from the “low and private precincts of the common,” McKeon demonstrates.29 Similarly, Poovey argues that disinterest engendered a form of subjectivity that justified the self-government required with the demise of absolute monarchical rule. If “a disinterested account could be provided, then some segments of the state—most notably the market—could be trusted to govern themselves,” she writes.30 The reformulation loosened the material bases of disinterest by constructing it as a capacious vision that developed out of experience and education rather than economic security. McKeon accordingly describes it as a comprehensive gaze. In separating out the “ethico-epistemological from material independence” and relocating disinterest to the private realm, the discourse provided access to the ideal to tradesmen and to women, as McKeon briefly notes, citing Addison’s Spectator and Steele’s Tatler, which accorded mental freedom to traders liberated from baronial vassalage and granted to leisured women “an easy detachment from what pass for the affairs and interests of the great world.”31 Although McKeon acknowledges the opening that the newly reconstituted disinterest provided to women and the propertyless, I contend that novels of inheritance completed the work these theories made possible by feminizing disinterest. They deploy the explanatory power of narrative to breathe life into an ideal of disinterest not as “a state of pure disinterestedness but a balance of interests between self and other, public and private, subjectivity and external demands.”32 Unlike pure disinterest, the act of balancing is one that can only be rendered and made persuasive in narrative form. Disinterest so understood is a continuing effort rather than a single act. It is easy to overlook, in hindsight, the extraordinary transvaluation represented by the association of disinterest with women. As Steele implied and many critics have noted, civic humanist ideals held out no possibility for virtue for the politically disenfranchised—women and the propertyless. Moreover, gender stereotypes


deemed women “more infected by particularity” and consequently “incapable of impersonal or ‘universal’ judgment, of acting rationally on principles,” as Jean Grimshaw summarizes.33 Jean-Jacques Rousseau was voicing nothing new, consequently, when he claimed that women were unsuited to politics because of their inability to consider the general good rather than private advantage. Indeed, he was espousing conventionalities when claiming in Emile that biology dictated that all women’s actions are deeply interested and that their education teaches them to recognize their dependence and manipulate their protectors. Whereas the young Emile’s education is meant to teach self-reliance, disinterest, and freedom from the social and economic interests of others in modern society, women such as Sophie are to learn to use their mind and face as “weapons … to supplement the strength they lack and to direct [men’s] own.”34 For Rousseau as for many thinkers of the time, female disinterest was an oxymoron. Just as narrative allowed for demonstrations of the balancing act of selflessness, the form was crucial to rendering disinterest plausible, in philosophy as well as in fiction. As Carol Rose argues, the period’s major political theorists inevitably turned from abstraction to story-telling when explicating the rise of a private property system out of the state of nature. This, she claims, was because narrative allowed them to elide illogicalities and contradictions that would otherwise be obvious—such as the necessity of some people acting against their own immediate best interests for society to function.35 Early political economy derived its claims for “the law-like regularity of economic relations” from the presumption of a universal drive to maximize self-interest and accumulate profit, as Joyce Appleby notes. However, Carol Rose contends that establishing property systems requires both trust and a more expansive sense of interest than such a drive would suggest.36 Because such cooperation “presupposes a kind of character who is not predicted in the standard [modern] story about property,” classical property theorists turned to stories to make sense of the puzzling moment when human beings, otherwise imagined as universally driven to pursue self-interest, envisioned themselves as a community. Their narratives, she argues, “allowed them to slide smoothly over the cooperative gap in their systematic analyses of self-interest.”37 Rose describes self-effacing acts as examples of “unpredicted preference orderings,” using game theory to demonstrate that some


people—such as mothers—do indeed find satisfaction in eschewing self-interest. Tales of such acts, she argues, endow a culture with indirect “memories” of selflessness.38 While essentialist notions of gender have long provided a handy explanation for why some characters would sacrifice their own immediate needs (choosing “unpredicted preference orderings”), I argue that in the eighteenth century such essentialisms grew more rigid precisely because of the need to reconceptualize property relations and, crucially, imagine how disinterest could come into being. Gender stereotypes that positioned women as biologically or emotionally weak posited a credible story about why “some people” would give up their self-interest in favor of the larger family or society. Theorists such as Carol Gilligan have made claims for women’s innate drive toward a more cooperative ethic; even without accepting that conception, we can argue that women were expected to grease the wheels of civic cooperation and—increasingly in the eighteenth century—were legally and ideologically driven to do so. In novels of inheritance, then, gender ideologies supplement the explanatory appeal of narrative to imagine cooperative individuals: heroines who routinely reject economic calculations of value by choosing disinterest over self-interest. Rose suggests that disinterest appears irrational in a self-interested society. Other paradoxes bedevil the ideal as well. As George Levine writes, disinterest both limns an idealized self—capable of a wideranging and encompassing vision—and demands the eradication of that self’s drives in the pursuit of impartiality. If disinterest requires both the willingness and the ability “to repress the aspiring, desiring, emotion-ridden self and everything merely personal, contingent, historical, material that might get in the way of acquiring knowledge,” then it seemingly requires the destruction of identity.39 Accordingly, disinterest represents the paradox of modernity, in which “materiality entails the incorporeal, [and] the self gains its power by annihilating itself.”40 The paradoxical nature of disinterest is further reinforced by another conundrum at the heart of the ideal, one that philosophers of sense and sensibility were never entirely able to solve: It would seem that “[o]nly those with an interest can be disinterested,” in Terry Eagleton’s phrasing.41 While civic humanists presumed only secure and extensive land-based wealth could free the individual to act with disinterest, the proponents of sensibility regarded acts of charity as the signal sign of benevolence. Benevolence is available


only to the well-heeled, or costly to the point of self-sacrifice to the poor. Disinterest, in both constructions, is deeply interested, dependent on material possessions—and consequently no disinterest at all. By both feminizing and narrating disinterest, the early novel lends plausibility to a new theory of its origins, one more expansive than the innate impulse theory of sensibility, while also resolving (uneasily and briefly) its paradoxes. Heroines of Disinterest in the late-century novel continuously reassert the possibility of individuals’ recognizing community as well as personal, economic interests, in plots that either reward that high-mindedness or treat its punishment as a tragedy. While they may seem predictable in retrospect, I contend, these tales bridge premodern and modern ideals of property. They contribute to the modern ideal of character as self-determined while retaining the traditional emphasis on virtue as other-directed. By envisioning disinterest as the consequence of experience, suffering, and engaged autodidacticism rather than stable proprietorship and a classical, leisured education, these works free character from its material basis. The Heroine of Disinterest is inevitably a woman in a precarious social and economic position, empathetic because of her own suffering or loss. The story of Charlotte Smith’s titular Emmeline is typical in its trajectory: An orphan raised in isolation by an uncle, she turns out to be her father’s legitimate child and consequently his heir; she marries the man she has secretly loved and takes ownership of the family estate from her relative. In the end, she feels infinite gratitude toward “that Providence, who, from indigence and dependance, had raised her to the highest affluence; given her … the tenderest of husbands … and had bestowed on her the means and the inclination to deserve, by virtue and beneficence, that heaven, where only she can enjoy more perfect and lasting felicity.”42 Like Emmeline and Burney’s Evelina, Eliza Parsons’ novel Lucy ends with the heroine’s marriage and restoration to status: “Lucy, the amiable obscure girl, the grateful protégée of Lady Campley, and at length the acknowledged daughter of good and respectable parents, found in the unchangeable admiration and esteem of her worthy husband and his revered uncle—in the respect of her friends, and in the approbation of her own heart, an abundance of happiness that overpaid the painful events she had experienced in her earlier days,” we are told.43 Despite their trials, such heroines inevitably conclude that all was for the best: “that it was good for her she had been afflicted; since


adversity had confirmed her in principles of rectitude, and enlarged her heart towards the children of misfortune, and taught her to feel for others that tender compassion she had so largely experienced in herself.” The same sentiment is repeated in the conclusions to Emmeline, A Simple Story, The Mysteries of Udolpho, and countless other novels assuring readers of the benevolence of the newly enriched heroine. As Elizabeth Bonhote suggests of her heroine Olivia, long-suffering women “like gold … [are] the purer for every additional trial,” and the community the richer for their ascent.44 Unlike the children of affluence, these heroines are educable in the lessons of virtue because of, rather than in spite of, their poverty and unstable social identity. Accordingly, in Bonhote’s novel, the heroine’s adopted father and tutor presumes a combination of experience, example, and prescription teaches virtue, but that goodness is comprehensible only to those not rendered ineducable by pride, vanity, or sordidness: qualities that inevitably accompany dissipation and consequently retard the “benign progress, or disguise the unadorned beauty” of truth (1: 34). Heroines of Disinterest inevitably demonstrate intellectual curiosity and educational receptivity despite the limits placed on their opportunities by isolation, neglect, or misogynist obstruction. Although in Burney’s novels, the heroines’ virtuous educations are demonstrated rather than described, other heroines are clearly autodidacts: Emmeline educates herself in her uncle’s library, developing empathy, taste, and discretion, as do the heroines of Sarah Cobbe’s Julia St. Helen; or, the Heiress of Ellisborough (1800), Agnes Maria Bennett’s Anna; or, Memoirs of a Welsh Heiress (1785), and Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy, among many others. Crucially, the protagonists are also educated by their “peculiar” circumstances, an obscured, denied, or unknown relation to the family estate. Parental neglect or death and their precarious social situation teach them a respect for family affection that entirely supersedes economic concerns and inoculates them against the lure of wealth. Education, then, figures as a key element in the revision of disinterest, but education itself is remapped and democratized. A good education creates the capacity for disinterest, the ability to step outside an entrapping subjectivity and adopt a comprehensive gaze.45 In their efforts to justify aristocratic privilege, civic humanists emphasized the pedagogical possibilities available only to the wealthy and leisured. Yet as McKeon argues, the theory backfired


by treating disinterest as a function of self-development: “Once this door is opened, of course—once disinterestedness is seen to be a function not of birth or its privileges but experience—the separation out of epistemology from social status is well under way. Authority that had seemed by custom an automatic condition of rank could be loosened, detached, and applied elsewhere.”46 Even more evocatively, the revision, along with pedagogical trends, devalued the education of the aristocrat. Education, increasingly imagined as the province of the home, came to be perceived as a form of intellectual independence from custom and privilege (the inevitable substance of a gentleman’s education, along with such qualities as Bonhote’s pride and vanity) rather than inculcation into them. Accordingly, a private education within the affectively bound family was seen as the last best hope for instilling disinterest based on a heroic resistance to the seductions of consumerism and luxury. By the middle of the eighteenth century, then, disinterest had been domesticated and the home transformed into “the seat of primary socialization, of Puritan discipline and gentle cultivation, through which it took on those nonprivate private values that we associate with the ethos of the domestic sphere,” including disinterest.47 It is the novel of inheritance, in turn, that brings life to this new paradigm. By foregrounding the issue of the heroine’s educational receptivity, these novels also canvas the one area of overlap between civic humanist and capitalist theories concerning identity formation. Civic humanism theorized that “desire for education” as well as economic freedom was crucial to the landowner’s refinement of “the virtues of self-reliance, self-governance, public-spiritedness [and] practical wisdom.”48 Lockean liberalism—a theory of ascent and accumulation—imagined education as the bootstrap that, when tied to industriousness, would lift the hard-working to greater status. In the eighteenth century, then, education served two masters, providing a short-hand for the liberal dream of unlimited self- and wealthcreation as well as the Plan B for civic humanists’ pursuit of class and gender rigidity: Only those possessing inherited wealth, and therefore leisure and educational access, would have the qualifications for political power. In these novels, the heroine demonstrates the public-minded citizen’s “desire for education,” but her propriety precedes her property; her eventual restoration to the family estate, in Lockean fashion, rewards and signifies her intelligence and industry.


A proper education constitutes the heroines’ most important and potentially ennobling possession, the acquisition of “virtues which they may call their own,” as Mary Wollstonecraft argued, because gained Lockean-style “by [their] own exertions.”49 The disinterested heiress showcases the education invested in her and her ability to profit from it, morally and therefore materially. The originary Heroine of Disinterest is certainly Samuel Richardson’s first creation, the most property-conscious of eighteenth-century heroines. Pamela’s obsessive cataloging of goods and guineas lends her a decided air of profit-making, a zeal contemporary critics such as Henry Fielding lost no time in mocking. Her list-making, however, serves a crucial function, demonstrating her intimate knowledge of the value of the material goods she rejects as well as her persistence in seeing proprietorship as about people rather than things. A liminal figure, expertly educated in the value of property yet capable of disregarding it, Pamela foreshadows later heroines’ more dramatic economic ignorance. The discarded heiresses who follow, from Evelina Anville to Elizabeth Bennet, are all gentlemen’s daughters, albeit tenuously so; their journeys from dispossession to possession, from poverty to wealth, or from disinheritance to inheritance tell complicated stories of gendered rights based ultimately in Pamela’s bald tale of sex, money, and education. The threat to Pamela’s chastity that propels the plot serves Richardson’s moral purposes as well as the potential licentiousness of readers, as contemporaries including Fielding were quick to note. More to the point, Mr. B’s siege allows for a lengthy investigation of the extent of the heroine’s disinterest, a rejection of the charms of wealth that constitutes her greater claim to virtue. Although initially ignorant of her master’s sexual intent, she is no innocent in terms of property theory. Her sophisticated understanding is demonstrated as she regularly updates her tab according to a complex calculation of emotional and financial receipts and obligations. Pamela negotiates the vexed territory of eighteenth-century property relations, balancing filial affection, gratitude, wages, and virtue in her ledger. While the conclusion to her tale collapses all property relations into those of marriage, her intellectual acrobatics concerning the value of labor, love, and loyalty say much about the period’s unresolved and therefore obsessive concern with the relations between what one owns and who one is—or can become.


Pamela elaborates her property theory when, after her mistress’ death, she prepares to return home to her family in order to escape her lecherous master. In this crucial scene, she proves herself to be a flexible and sophisticated judge of property relations. She gathers her coins and groups her belongings into three bundles reflecting differing degrees of ownership. The grouping is suggestive, given the twentieth-century theory that proprietorship should be understood as a momentarily united “bundle of sticks”—a variable combination of entitlements and duties rather than simply the control of an object. That bundle, according to recent theorists, includes not only the right to use an object as one pleases and exclude others from its use, but to transfer its possession to others, temporarily or permanently—to give away a stick.50 In this theory of ownership as a relation among people rather than between a person and an object, ownership is most heroically manifested in alienation: the right to give up control that paradoxically signifies absolute dominion. To have is not necessarily to hold. Giving is receiving.51 Moreover, in the “bundle” theory, private possession is by definition a right derived from public consent—belying the capitalist dream of despotic dominion. Pamela’s disinterest, then, announces itself in her perception of ownership as a social statement, even while cataloging those private possessions that constitute her personal identity. Accordingly, she asks the housekeeper, Mrs. Jervis, to witness her decision-making, thereby serving as a community representative to sanctify her rights. Parsing proprietorship is crucial to Pamela’s identity as a moral free agent, but it requires an audience. No owner is an island; proprietorship is moot in a world of one: “It is not enough, then, for the property claimant to say simply, ‘It’s mine,’ through some act or gesture; in order for the statement to have any force, some relevant world must understand the claim it makes and take the claim seriously,” says Carol Rose.52 In laying out her three bundles in the green room to determine which will stay and which will go, in analyzing the proprietorship of the coins, and in writing the letters that will be circulated to win converts, Pamela demands the acquiescence of that “relevant world.” Depending on how objects were acquired and with what intention, Pamela imagines her proprietorship to range from nonexistent to absolute. In evaluating her rights to retain goods and money


earned or received during her employment, she weighs the value of the instruction she received in the home, the wages she never received as an apprentice, and the affective and physical labor she expended. As her mistress’ favored servant, she was an employee in training—as yet unpaid; a servant required to show gratitude; and a daughter figure expected to return favors with love. Her education she recognizes as a gift, a benefit borne of her mistress’ generosity that she can repay only with the expected lower-class emotion of gratitude. She accordingly “mingl[es] ... Blessings for her Goodness” with her calculations but feels fully justified in using the intellectual fruits of her upbringing to think and decide for herself (78). Balancing these obligations and rights, she rejects ownership of her mistress’s discarded finery, recognizing her role as a representative or mascot: “Those Things there of my Lady’s, I can have no Claim to, so as to take them away; for she gave them me, supposing I was to wear them in her Service, and to do Credit to her bountiful Heart” (79). Admitting the intricacy of her analysis, she acknowledges the point as one of conscience, but determines that the clothes were not intended simply for her use but to enhance her mistress’s social reputation. They were in fact part of her mistress’s bundle of sticks; the seeming gifts were her lady’s paradoxical assertion of possession through transference. The stockings will stay. Always pragmatic, Pamela also notes the clothing’s lack of utility given some unpleasant realities of human nature: “But since I am to be turn’d away, you know, I cannot wear them at my poor Father’s; for I should bring all the little Village upon my Back: And so I resolve not to have them” (79). Pamela has no uncertainty about how to treat the second bundle, the gifts from her master. Pieces of property tell stories, and she is alert to the possibility that those stories, unlike her letters, can lie. Consequently, she disavows those gifts she innocently accepted from her master, recognizing that they could be interpreted as bribes. She assures Mrs. Jervis that she will leave those behind because their acceptance would imply her acquiescence to a sexual contract she now recognizes as his intention. She does not give these goods descriptive life in this scene, but we know what they are from her earlier letters, in which she describes herself naïvely accepting them. The wicked bundle includes “a Suit of my old Lady’s Cloaths, and half a Dozen of her Shifts, and Six fine Handkerchiefs, and Three of her Cambrick Aprons, and Four Holland ones,” as she had written


her parents (18). In that earlier letter, she regretted only the imperative to retain the items as clothing rather than profit from their value as merchandise: “The Cloaths are fine Silks, and too rich and too good for me, to be sure. I wish it was no Affront to him to make Money of them, and send it to you: it would do me more good” (18). Oddly, her profiteering impulse confirms her humility and disinterest. In longing to sell her goods, she indicates that she finds no value in self-display. The bundle also includes other gifts from her “old Lady’s Closet,” exactingly detailed and subtly flattering. These include “Two Suits of fine Flanders lac’d Headclothes, Three Pair of fine Silk Shoes, two hardly the worse, and just fit for me; for my old Lady had a very little Foot; and several Ribbands and Topknots of all Colours, and Four Pair of white fine Cotton Stockens, and Three Pair of fine Silk ones; and Two Pair of rich Stays, and a Pair of rich Silver Buckles in one Pair of the Shoes” (19). Before she recognized the contract implied by accepting these fineries, she accepted Mrs. Jervis’ claim that the gifts were divinely inspired and incentives to labor: “God put it into his [Mr. B’s] Heart to be good to me; and I must double my Diligence” (19). In the green room, however, she categorizes these goods as either “the Price of [her] Shame,” useless, or fraudulent if accepted when intending to leave her position: “I should think I should never prosper with them; and, besides, you know, Mrs. Jervis, if I would not do the good Gentleman’s Work, why should I take his Wages? So, in Conscience, in Honour, in every thing, I have nothing to say to thee, thou second wicked bundle!” (79). The goods she once perceived as divine rewards have transformed utterly with her recognition of Mr. B’s lechery; intriguingly, she presumes that his motives trump hers in determining the nature of the goods. Those silk stockings and silver buckles, although accepted innocently, imply a contractual relation to Mr. B as master or lover; she must reject the goods, not just the intent, to decline his silent offer. Although equally emphatic about the proprietorship of the final bundle, containing purchases and the products of her labor, she is vexed about her right to the four guineas that her master gave her from her lady’s personal effects. Unlike the clothing, the money is a symbol of uncertain signification, telling an ambiguous tale. Balancing her unpaid labor with her education and affective duties, Pamela asks the housekeeper’s advice about whether she “may be


supposed to be Quits” with the family and consequently keep the money as belated wages (80). Pamela’s query suggests the confusion created by the entwining of feudal and modern concepts in her status in the household. She conceives of her education as a benefit that partly offsets her labor, but she contends that her accomplishments will be of little use when she returns to “hard Labour,” presumes her lady would have agreed with that utilitarian calculation, and consequently accords her accomplishments no monetary value. She moves on to balance the worth of her work and her board: “Well then, if so, I would ask, whether in above this Year that I have liv’d with my Master, as I am resolv’d to leave all his Gifts behind me, I may not have earn’d besides my Keeping, these four Guineas; and these poor Cloaths here upon my Back, and in my third Bundle?” (80). Mrs. Jervis, not surprisingly, is utterly incapable of the intellectual hairsplitting that Pamela has demonstrated. Declaring herself unable “to speak … at all,” she refuses to attempt to estimate the worth of an education in accomplishments for a girl returning to poverty, nor can she evaluate the cost of Pamela’s “keeping” versus the value of her “services” (80). Because a market analysis of labor or of education is foreign to the housekeeper, she falls back on a paternalist concept of power relations: “To be sure, it will be the highest Affront that can be offer’d, for you to leave any of these Things behind you,” she manages to say (80). The question of the guineas lingers on until marital law resolves Pamela’s property status and the initial four are overwhelmed by many more gifts of golden guineas. Pamela’s third bundle (“and a little one it is”) consists of those things over which she considers herself to have absolute ownership, humble objects which represent her own labor or her family’s (78). She is remarkably and tellingly prolix in her description of “poor Pamela’s Bundle” (78). Her detail suggests both her emotional investment in these items and the care with which she has gathered them. These goods also tell a story, for they signify her willingness to accept her loss of status upon departure from the estate. The pleasure she takes in a calico nightgown from her childhood argues for her willingness to return to a pre-sexual state within her family; the cloth she saves for making shirts and shifts for her parents showcases her frugality, willingness to labor, and devotion; and the stockings and coat purchased from a peddler demonstrate her humble assessment of her needs. The goods depict Pamela as Pamela would like to be


interpreted and imply her ownership of a final intangible bundle— self-possession—in a society that begrudges her a buckle. The bundle is so crucial to her identity that she personifies it, indeed imagines herself in a relationship with it. Addressing it as the companion of her poverty and witness to her honesty, she declares her possession of these items as contingent upon her virtue. “[M]ay I never deserve the least Rag that is contained in thee, when I forfeit a Title to that Innocence that I hope will ever be the Pride of my Life,” she announces, calling over (oddly) the “dear third Parcel” for a hug (79). Standing astride the shores of feudalism and capitalism, a Lockean in a position of servitude, Pamela assesses the value of affective and material goods while presuming self-ownership. As Pamela ruthlessly divests herself of all but the most humble goods, she inaugurates the ideal of economic self-sacrifice taken to its extreme. Claiming her willingness to survive on berries or walk enormous distances, she insists she can find independence through contracting her desires, a plan Mary Wollstonecraft would laud late in the century and that, the novel implies, Pamela learned from her father, who claims to prefer to live off ditch water than accept payments for her lost virtue.53 Although shrewd about the value of the lace on a shoe, Pamela is impervious to the pleasures of luxury, the possibility of suffering from want, or the temptation to enrich her family at the cost of her chastity. She considers virtue evacuated by illicit possession, whether she literally gives her body or not. Retaining possession of the goods with which Mr. B attempted to buy her virtue appears to her to be as damning as the physical act it implies. Selling herself to enrich herself or her parents—or even allowing herself to be perceived to have done so—would suggest not only sexual immorality but the loss of another even more precarious innocence: a blindness to the real degradations associated with rural poverty. It would also signify the failure of her parents’ educational program. Intriguingly, the traditional link between a woman’s virtue and her chastity did important work in enabling a reconciliation of conflicting ideals of property. Chastity was a girl’s best friend in the eighteenth century, the closest contender for self-possession, an alternative and morally superior property from which the dispossessed could stake an identity. Yet chastity of course was a property in which the family had a deeply vested interest. Young women’s


behavior influenced the reputation of their fathers and brothers and their own value on the marriage market. When married, women were the property of their husbands, their chastity a community concern. Their monogamy ensured familial continuity in the transmission of both real and immaterial property: the estate and, increasingly, an education. Moreover, a woman’s virtue was hardly inviolate or inalienable, which is why virtue was always in distress; indeed, a woman’s right to this property could be stolen without her knowledge, her virtue destroyed not only by physical violation but social misinterpretation. Maintaining reputation required community assent. A woman’s reputation signified society’s willingness to honor her ownership over her body; a rake’s sly comment could destroy that right. Concern for community opinion in Pamela does not suggest the specious pursuit of reputation alone—of appearance rather than reality, of cunning rather than virtue—but a realization that proprietorship is a social relation, not an individual assertion. Personal belief in one’s right to possess means little if neither the community nor the law recognizes that right. Equating propriety with chastity surely limited the imagined possibilities for female empowerment, but it also allowed a continued investigation of possession as socially constructed: a right and a duty over which neither the owner nor the family had sole dominion. Like later heroines, Pamela ultimately gains access to property through marriage by refusing to adopt the Blackstonian assumption of proprietorship as one man’s dominion, a plot of land extending indefinitely upwards into the heavens and downwards to the center of the Earth.54 Pamela’s refusal to consider wealth as an absolute good attests to her virtue as fundamentally as does her chastity. Indeed, one could argue that Pamela trumpets not primarily sexual purity but economic selflessness; in refusing to sell her chastity, Pamela repeatedly and insistently rejects wealth and power, an act of virtue that earns her their acquisition. The community believes the story she tells not just because of her persuasive rhetoric, but also because of her handling of property: Her disinterest wins her a husband, social acceptance for that union, and the moral right to oversee the distribution of money and goods. Her story consequently envisions a resolution to the cultural impasse over the links between propriety and proprietorship and provides a model for later heroines, from Burney to Radcliffe and on to Austen.

2 Burney’s Heroines of Disinterest

Frances Burney’s protagonists, spanning 36 years, are the quintessential Heroines of Disinterest. Evelina (1778), Cecilia (1782), Camilla (1796), and The Wanderer (1814) are all investigations of the possibilities and perils faced by disinterested women in a misogynist, self-interested world—one deeply interested, in fact, in maintaining women’s mental and economic dependence. This chapter analyzes Burney’s first two novels, Evelina and Cecilia, to explore that world, for the two novels, written five years apart, are a pair: One the story of an heiress ascending, the other of one descending. Together, they plot out the varied possibilities for disinterest, and consequently identity, within the context of dispossession (Evelina), of assured wealth (Cecilia) and of the loss of the wealth (the conclusion of Cecilia) upon which an identity has been constructed. Although often described as a courtship novel, Evelina is not a Cinderella tale but a lengthy investigation of the appropriate relay of affection and property among family members.1 The worthiness of Frances Burney’s protagonists, like that of Richardson’s, turns upon their sophisticated understanding of the social relations implied by ownership and their extraordinary capacity for disinterest. The heroine of Burney’s first novel performs that disinterest on the London social stage and in her father’s parlor to earn her family name and estate. She ultimately demonstrates her mastery of an ideal of family relations I call the affective economy of exchange. In the affective economy, women earn support through a display of devotion and disinterest that signifies their worthiness to possess even as it establishes their unwillingness to calculate the material rewards implicit 39


in the exchange. The child’s offering of obedience and devotion in return for parental protection and property is certainly nothing new. What is new is the requirement of disinterest, extended to suggest not the ability simply to rise above material considerations but to be absolutely impenetrable to them. It is in these novels that disinterest, in turn, is seen as the consequence of a certain kind of education, typically the intellectual and moral instruction of a virtuous, unaristocratic father figure like Villars or of fervent self-instruction, always combined with an experiential education in suffering and loss. In Evelina, the word “peculiar” is used repeatedly to capture the characteristic contradiction between character and birth in the novel of inheritance. The “peculiar cruelty of her situation” derives directly from a material reality, Evelina’s position as a “deserted child, though legally heiress of two large fortunes,” denied the means to establish herself in the class to which she was born.2 Accordingly, in defending her from Sir Clement Willoughby’s seductions, Lord Orville can say only that Evelina is “peculiarly situated,” deserving more respect than seems appropriate for a woman of mysterious origins (345). The phrase is particularly apt, given its history. In the eighteenth century the word “peculiar” still clung to its etymological roots, and those roots were in private property. Samuel Johnson tells us that “peculiar” derives from the Latin adjective peculiaris and noun peculium, defined by the OED as “not held in common with others” and “property in cattle, private property.” Both derive from pecu, meaning “cattle, money.” In a longer entry on peculium, the OED defines it as meaning, in the late seventeenth century, “a private or exclusive possession or property.” Johnson’s primary definitions for “peculiar” describe the terms of absolute ownership. For the noun, he provides “the property; the exclusive property” and “something abscinded from the ordinary jurisdiction.” He gives the adjective form three meanings, only the last of which is not directly related to property: “appropriate; belonging to any one with exclusion of others,” “not common to other things,” and “particular, single.” The idea of oddity attached to the adjective today can then be directly traced to the less pejorative idea of singular or characteristic, which in turn derives from the ancient elision between identity and property. The land or money or cattle that one absolutely possesses is singularly one’s own and therefore characteristic. It is one’s peculiar. The peculiar cruelty of Evelina’s

Burney’s Heroines of Disinterest 41

circumstances, then, is her displacement from her peculiar—the property allied to her lineage. Like other orphaned or abandoned heroines, however, she is consequently the recipient of a peculiarly apt education in the affective economy. Although the plot attributes Evelina’s circumstances to paternal neglect and ultimately a nursemaid’s fraud, it is crucial to note the historical resonance of her situation. She is the only daughter of a baronet, precisely the figure that the strict settlement sought to disinherit and had indeed vanquished by the time the novel was written. Emmeline, Julia St. Helen, and Bennett’s Anna are also only daughters, as are a majority of the restored heiresses in eighteenthcentury novels, including Ann Radcliffe’s Emily St. Aubert and Matilda, the second heroine of Inchbald’s A Simple Story. In assuming that the only daughter, a figure Eileen Springs calls the heiress-at-law, should “in law, in justice” regain access to the family estate, these novels interrogate the primary ambition of the immensely influential legal device (386). Indeed, they entirely reject its animating ethos, which justified the circumscription of women’s common law rights with claims of female irrationality and necessary dependence. These novels, beginning with Evelina, depict women whose virtue, disinterest, and benevolence restore propriety to estates otherwise corrupted by the pursuit of interests, construed narrowly as economic and external. The plot of the disinterested woman’s restoration provides a narrative for the workings of the affective economy, a transitional ideal of familial property relations. Described or demonstrated in numerous eighteenth-century novels, education tracts, and conduct books, the affective economy draws on a paradigm John Locke articulates in his Second Treatise of Government. In imagining the evolution of society out of a state of nature, Locke describes an instinctual tenderness as the motivation for a complex and carefully calibrated exchange of material and emotional properties between parent and child. He envisions the initial state of nature as composed of an atomistic group of men gathering acorns or apples for nourishment or tilling and improving land, all constituting a labor that will make those objects their property. These efforts provide the rationale for his labor theory, the notion that one acquires property by acting upon it: “His labour hath taken it out of the hands of nature, where it was common, and belonged equally to all her children, and hath


thereby appropriated it to himself.”3 The beauty of this theory is that property is fairly distributed and presumably uncontested because, by definition, the amount acquired is based on the effort expended and because, by the law of nature, no one acquires more than he can use. Property and propriety are indivisible, with possession going naturally to the “industrious and rational” so long as “labour was to be his title to it” (Section 34). This stage does not last. The development of families eventually necessitates the creation of distinct and permanent property lines. The need for private property arises when the hypothetical acorngatherer becomes a father with children and servants, a head of family with a reason for acquiring more property than needed for his own immediate consumption. Although Locke does not state directly that natural man would be inspired to extend his property to support his wife and children, his lonely hunter and gatherer turns at just that moment of expansion into a parent and husband with the need to provide a “plentiful supply,” his increased desire for sole proprietorship linked to the desire to provide for a dependent family and, later, bequeath an estate (Section 48). “As families increased, and industry enlarged their stocks, their possessions enlarged with the need of them,” Locke says, eventually leading these groups to establish private property by setting boundaries to their territories (Section 38). With private property also comes a monetary system to enshrine that increased property in “some lasting thing that men might keep without spoiling” (Section 47). According to Locke’s story, then, the natural desire to provide for one’s family increases acquisitiveness, leading inexorably toward the privatization of property. Yet clearly acquisitiveness, if entirely selfdirected, could destroy families as well. Locke needs to explain why parents share their goods, fulfilling their obligation to support and educate their children until they reach the age of reason—fittingly defined as the ability to “order [their] possessions” (Sections 65, 59). That near-absolute obligation, he argues, is enforced by an emotion he calls tenderness, which inspires parents to maintain their children, refrain from absconding with their property, and resist using their pedagogical power to tyrannize over them well into adulthood. Locke turns to a higher power to assure us of the inevitability of this saving grace: “God hath woven into the principles of human nature such a tenderness for their off-spring, that there is little fear that


parents should use their power with too much rigour; the excess is seldom on the severe side, the strong byass of nature drawing the other way” (Section 67). Tender parents tender property to their children in the form of food and clothing and in the provision of education. Parental tenderness in Locke, then, has extraordinary power. It indirectly leads to a private property and monetary system; it also orders familial relations to ensure individual and ultimately social survival. In this Lockean economy, children give as well as take, however. They must make affective offerings in exchange for the property received: educational, physical, and emotional. They owe a nevercancelled debt of reverence and respect to their parents, the laborers “by whose means [they] entered into being.” The familial relay of support and filial piety is by no means a casual one in Locke’s estimation. He carefully calibrates their relation, specifying that the child’s “respect, reverence, support and compliance too [is proportioned] more or less, as the father’s care, cost, and kindness in his education, has been more or less” (Section 67). Locke ties the degrees of reverence so precisely to goods received that he imagines siblings’ obligations “varied by the different care and kindness, trouble and expense, which is often employed upon one child more than another” (Section 70). The potential for inheritance provides another variable to this dynamic. Locke imagines the post-mortem bequest as a natural rather than conventional device and a crucial element in family discipline as well as in the political order (Section 72). “The power men generally have to bestow their estates on those who please them best,” he suggests, forcefully impresses grown children with a desire to please their parents, as “it is commonly in the father’s power to bestow it with a more sparing or liberal hand, according as the behavior of this or that child hath comported with his will and humour” (Section 72). Accordingly, although grown children are freed from parental dictate, they will continue to obey their parents, even to the point of adopting their political allegiances, in order to inherit. For “if they will enjoy the inheritance of their ancestors, they must take it on the same terms their ancestors had it, and submit to all the conditions annexed to such a possession. By this power indeed fathers oblige their children to obedience to themselves, even when they are past minority, and most commonly too subject them to this or that political power” (Section 73). Tenderness inspires the


initial exchange between the generations of emotional and physical goods for survival. The potential for inheritance also gives parents a crucial form of control that lends greater political stability. Locke’s theory naturalizes the transfer of property by linking it to familial affection. In so doing, his paradigm lends propriety to inheritance, the least defensible of property transfers, by imagining the bequest as inspired by natural obligations and earned through good behavior and devotion—a form of emotional labor.4 Notably, however, the rise of the strict settlement by the end of the seventeenth century undercut the workings of Locke’s familial economy. Perfected during the period in which Locke was writing, the combination of trusts and entails determined how the estate would transfer for several generations in advance, designating a succession of potential male relatives as heirs. In most cases, the timing of the settlements meant that a father would hold the property in trust during his children’s lifetime, depriving him of the traditional power to use the estate as reward and punishment. The consequences did not go unnoticed. As Ruth Perry notes, Edward Wortley Montagu in a 1710 Tatler column “railed against entailing estates on as yet unborn heirs, a practice which he said was based in pride and folly and made it impossible to reward or punish children according to their deserts,” a prescient recognition given that Edward Wortley, Jr. would prove to be the classic n’er-do-well eldest son.5 Anxieties about real changes in inheritance practices, then, as well as the link between political and domestic paradigms in much political theory of the period, fed eighteenth-century writers’ interest in the workings of the familial economy. Intriguingly, like Locke, pedagogues and conduct book writers repeatedly construe tenderness as a crucial element in family relations. The many valences of the word tender, denoting an emotion, money, or the act of offering, capture the multiple levels on which the system operated.6 The conduct-book writer Thomas Gisborne quotes Scripture on the fundamental nature of the father’s duty to plan for his children. “‘If any,’ saith St. Paul, ‘provide not for his own, and especially for those of his own house, he hath denied the faith, and is worse than an infidel’; he disobeys one of the clearest injunctions of Christianity, and omits to discharge an office, which Pagans in general would have been ashamed of neglecting.”7 James Fordyce gives paternal affection an important role in the family’s emotional and economic system, arguing that mothers should help educate children in “virtue


and society” so that fathers will be inspired by tenderness, spousal and paternal, to better provide for them: “By thus dividing [responsibility for education], you leave him more at leisure to plan and provide for you all; a task, which he prosecutes with tenfold alacrity, when he reflects on the beloved objects of it, and finds all his toils both soothed and rewarded by the wisdom and sweetness of your deportment to him and to his children.”8 The wife’s attentiveness to her children, he suggests, will be rewarded exponentially because the husband’s resulting tenderness will inspire him to spend his newly available time in providing for the family. Tenderness begets not only tender feelings, but also more legal tender. Fordyce’s analysis, like Locke’s, places property, education, and emotions in a complex relay, but he adds maternal obligations into a process that Locke seems to imagine almost entirely between fathers and sons. This is a significant transition. While the hypothetical child in Locke’s affective economy is male, in the novels and education tracts of the eighteenth century, the crucial actors are women, portrayed as naturally tender of heart themselves and designed to inspire tenderness in men. Tenderness in eighteenth-century works earns dependent wives, as well as children, their keep. To Edmund Burke, tenderness is the emotion that gives beauty its “social quality,” attracting men to women.9 Young women are commonly told that “tenderness and softness are the peculiar charms of the sex,” notes Hester Chapone in her Letters on the Improvement of the Mind.10 Following Addison and Steele’s lead, Adam Smith asserts that “the fair-sex … have much more tenderness than ours.”11 Similarly, in his Enquiry Into the Duties of the Female Sex, Gisborne highlights the “natural tenderness of the female mind” when attempting to delineate the “peculiar features by which the character of the female mind is naturally discriminated from that of the other sex.”12 Tenderness is an essential female quality, represented most elegantly by women in their characteristic role as family members, he contends: “Were we called upon to produce examples of the most amiable tendencies and affections implanted in human nature, of modesty, of delicacy, of sympathising sensibility, of prompt and active benevolence, of warmth and tenderness of attachment; whither should we at once turn our eyes? To the sister, to the daughter, to the wife.”13 In the ideal family economy these writers limn, tender-hearted daughters and wives naturally display a dutifulness and emotional


generosity that inevitably reaps material rewards. This is in part because tenderness, construed as weakness, inspires men’s protective instincts. “The Almighty has thrown you upon the protection of our sex,” claims Fordyce; accordingly, women instinctively seek male protection, in emotional and verbal displays, and men naturally wish to provide it.14 Gisborne omits the Almighty from his analysis, but like Fordyce presumes that women’s natural vulnerability, manifested as tenderness, proves so compelling that any decent man feels compelled to offer aid: “Nothing can be more certain than that your sex is, on every account, entitled to the shelter of ours. Your softness, weakness, timidity, and tender reliance on man; your helpless condition in yourselves, and his superior strength for labour, ability for defence, and fortitude in trial; your tacit acknowledgement of these, and frequent application for his aid in so many winning ways, concur to form a plea, which nothing can disallow or withstand but brutality.”15 Rousseau argued for a more active role by women, whom he contended were endowed with coquetry and modesty so that men would be manipulated into providing that protection, but winning tenderness still plays the crucial role: Her weakness may well be artifice, but he implies that the artifice itself is instinctual. “For them, desires come only with need,” and what women need, most of all, is men.16 As sexual beings, however, women also inspire “tenderness” of a different sort, the conduct book writers acknowledge implicitly (and Rousseau directly), potentially inducing illicit or excessive property transfers. (Indeed, Rousseau contended that if women were not naturally modest, they would destroy men: “men would finally be their victims and would see themselves dragged to death without ever being able to defend themselves.”)17 In novel after novel, tender fathers are also blamed for over-endowing the daughters upon whom they dote, again suggesting that excessive tenderness distorts the relations between property and people. Fordyce and other conduct book writers consequently exhort girls, repeatedly, to eschew sexual for familial tenderness: What honour can be enjoyed by your sex, equal to that of showing yourselves every way worthy of a virtuous tenderness from ours? What can be conceived so properly female as inspiring, improving, and continuing such a tenderness, in all its charming


extent? Contrasted with this, how unamiable, and how miserable, must we pronounce the passion for ungentle command, for petty dominion, so shamefully indulged by some women as soon as they find a man in their power!18 The passage is a classic conduct book exhortation to women to restrict their desire for power (and, indirectly, property) to the “properly female” affective economy of tenderness, eschewing the ambition of the coquette for the duties of the wife. As Fordyce urges, the good most appropriate for women to receive is the immaterial one of inspiring “virtuous tenderness.” The lure for eschewing “petty dominion” is that this “virtuous tenderness” will give good wives and daughters more appropriate access to goods or property, though not absolute dominion over those things. Fordyce is describing the gendered version of Locke’s affective economy that at times seems the primary lesson of eighteenthcentury conduct books and education tracts. In her 1772 Letters, Hester Chapone presumes a similar equation between tenderness and provision, but adopts a more pragmatic tone. She materializes the quality directly in reference after reference, urging women to recognize the power of this “engaging property” that garners “friends and favours” and to deploy it strategically.19 Women, she reminds her readers, must earn the family affection that will gain them attention and support; consequently, they serve their own “duty and interest” by becoming the “delight and darling” of the family.20 Given the importance of this emotion, they must take care not to undermine the family’s sweet pity with “a fit of ill humour” or even an acknowledgement of ill health: “Their selfishness defeats its own purpose, as it weakens that affection and tender pity which excites the most assiduous services.”21 Women without tenderness find nothing tendered. Significantly, Chapone describes tenderness as a property that must be continually earned in families as in friendships. She extends her material metaphor even further to make her point, invoking the logic of premodern property: “Affection is not like a portion of freehold land, which when once settled upon you is a possession for ever, without further trouble on your part—If you grow less deserving, or less attentive to please, you must expect to see the effects of your remissness, in the gradual decline of your friend’s esteem and attachment.”22 Rather than being absolute owners of


others’ affections, women hold feudal tenures and must continue to pay services in order to retain the goods that are the “Possession, not the Property” of dependents.23 In Chapone as in Fordyce, affection is materialized but not as complete dominion. Although generating continual debt, this property gives women a form of self-possession: even when women own nothing, they own something: an exchangeable good called tenderness. Naturalizing tenderness as a female instinct turns apparent acts of manipulation into acts of disinterest. However, given the apparent illogicalities and inevitable injustices in an economic system structured around female dependence as well as the long-held association of disinterest with aristocratic males, the affective economy required narrative as well as exhortation to bring it to life. Novels such as Evelina, Cecilia, and countless others embodied selflessness in Heroines of Disinterest who reap the Chaponian rewards of tenderness. In so doing, they made plausible a selflessness previously considered impossible for women and, by the mid-eighteenth century, contrary to human nature in general (as writers from Hobbes to Adam Smith would argue). These novels of disinterest elide inequality, then, but they also suggest an alternative to a society fueled by masculine self-interest and female scheming. Of Burney’s novels and indeed among the novels of inheritance, Evelina is the purest narrative performance of the affective economy. The affective economy’s malfunction is the direct cause of Evelina’s distresses as well as those of her mother; its repair is the cause of her success. Evelina’s mastery of the affective economy of exchange ultimately ensures not only her status but also rights three generations of disordered proprietorship. She proves herself not only a deserving daughter but also a woman whose benevolence, disinterest, and judgment will extend and regenerate propriety. Evelina’s dispossession by her own father, the propulsion for her plot, must consequently be understood in the context of her grandfather’s failure to properly shepherd his emotional and economic goods. Inspired precisely by the kind of tenderness Fordyce condemned, he married a beautiful tavern girl “at once uneducated and unprincipled; ungentle in her temper, and unamiable in her manners,” a decision that ensured his shame and early death (15). He bequeathed his misery with foolish estate planning. In his will—a document increasingly considered inappropriate to the landed classes in the eighteenth century—he


gave his tutor, Villars, guardianship of his daughter, but “in regard to fortune … left her wholly dependent on her mother, to whose tenderness he earnestly recommended her” (16).24 Mr. Evelyn’s presumptions derive from the Lockean paradigm, in which tenderness ensures propriety. Yet his provisions reveal a startling naïveté about the nature of his wife and the maneuvers necessary to protect his estate and his infant daughter. He assumes the affective economy will come naturally to his wife but not his child: He makes his daughter financially dependent on her mother to ensure that she will pay the woman “that respect and duty which, from her own child, were certainly her due,” yet assumes that the mother, despite her “illiberal” nature, will leave the estate to the child who has been taken from her (16). Mr. Evelyn fails to see that his wife will of necessity “fail in affection or justice” because she lacks the instinctive tenderness to ensure the appropriate transfer of property (16). It is precisely because of his imaginative failures on the day of his wedding and his death that the Evelyn estate “wanders” most fatally to a woman outside his class and comprehension, a displacement that ensures two more generations of suffering.25 Because his widow remarries and attempts to force her daughter into marriage to a relation of her new husband, the daughter elopes with Sir John Belmont. Because the daughter elopes, her mother, Madame Duval, refuses her a marital portion, and the groom abandons his bride and infant daughter, Evelina. Tenderness can misdirect property, the novel suggests; crucially, however, tenderness also teaches. Although Mr. Evelyn misjudged Madame Duval’s potential for tenderness, he placed his daughter (and by extension granddaughter) in the hands of a guardian who lived and breathed tenderness and accordingly taught both generations the operations of the affective economy. Villars has bestowed the “utmost attention and tenderness” upon his foster-daughter, he assures any who ask, insisting that she is “the subject of his tenderest thoughts, and the object of his latest cares” (15, 22). Having raised the helpless child from birth, Villars considers himself in the light of the foster parent in Locke’s Treatise, who gains from the neglectful parent the rights to the children’s honor and reverence.26 Villars demonstrates his sense of possession by making plans to give Evelina away, expecting not only to educate her and leave her a small competency but “to bestow her upon some worthy man, with


whom she might spend her days in tranquillity, chearfulness, and good-humour, untainted by vice, folly, or ambition” (128). In imagining her future, Villars lingers on a Chaponian vision of Evelina in a modest marriage in which exchanges of tenderness and offerings of useful services would replace exchanges in more material goods. If contented with a retired station, I still hope I shall live to see my Evelina the ornament of her neighbourhood, and the pride and delight of her family: giving and receiving joy from such society as may best deserve her affection, and employing herself in such useful and innocent occupations as may secure and merit the tenderest love of her friends, and the worthiest satisfaction of her own heart. Such are my hopes, and such have been my expectations. (118) Like Chapone, Villars imagines the ideal domestic scene as one in which a woman gives affection to the deserving, expressing that affection in “useful and innocent occupations” that in turn “secure and merit” her family and friends’ “tenderest love.” Julia Epstein’s unsympathetic treatment of Evelina’s guardian allows us to recognize a veiled threat in Villars’ reminder of his longtime expectations. He tells Evelina in the next sentence that he does not want to see “seventeen years work” undone. The threat carries weight because, as Epstein notes, he is her sole support: “If she angers or offends him, all is lost—on his approval rests her tenuous foothold in polite society.”27 Her material support depends entirely on his tenderness, for she has no legal claim to his assistance and unless she marries must depend on him for life. But Evelina and Villars, in writing to each other, interpret his tenderness as a guarantee, not a contingency. After she accidentally meets her treacherous grandmother, he reassures her by linking her financial stability to his love: “Secure of my protection, and relying on my tenderness, let no apprehensions of Madame Duval disturb your peace” (56). To the well-educated daughter deserving of affection and respect, tenderness (from both parties) secures property, even from someone who is not really Evelina’s “beloved father” (26). Tender women have no contract, but will never need one. Evelina acknowledges


the nature of the exchange in responding with sentimental excess to Villars’ letter pledging security: “In every mortification, every disturbance, how grateful to my heart, how sweet to my recollection, is the certainty of your never-failing tenderness, sympathy, and protection!” she writes (239). Later, when her father Sir John Belmont has rejected a petition to recognize her, she tells Villars she will not question whether he will continue to support her, for his tenderness allows no doubt: “I am more secure than ever of your kindness, since you now know upon that is my sole dependance” (160). Evelina’s tenderness, implying both emotional generosity and dependence, is the offering that guarantees her the protection Villars offers in the form of a competency. Although often presumed to be a function of her ignorance and consequently another failure in her education, Evelina’s refusal to consider economic consequences must be recognized as an act of agency and the ultimate assertion of the value of her upbringing and character. Her high-mindedness is a willed act, a construction of her own story as about emotional rather than financial exchanges. Evelina’s disinterest is inspired by a paradoxical impulse that is both natural and cultivated, combining passivity and agency. It works much like Frances Hutcheson’s description of a sixth moral sense, “a Determination of our Minds to receive amiable or disagreeable Ideas of Actions, when they shall occur to our Observation, antecedently to any Opinions of Advantage or Loss to redound to our selves from them.”28 Somehow the mind of sensibility “determines” what ideas to “receive” of an action, barring the entry of inappropriate calculations, even though that determination would seem to require prior knowledge. Similarly, Evelina allows her mind to receive only agreeable ideas or actions, her moral judgment antecedent to any opinions of advantage or loss. Intriguingly, she narrates her refusal, filling her letters with meta-commentaries in which she reflects on precisely what she has chosen not to tell. “Narrative does not offer, nor does a lively imagination supply the deficiency,” she writes her friend Maria to excuse her unwillingness to describe her emotions (262). Similarly, she announces that she will not acknowledge all that she may think about her father’s refusal to recognize her as his daughter and heiress (161). Money may talk, but Evelina won’t listen. Evelina rejects demands, seemingly even the thought, that she reclaim her inheritance through legal action and insists that it be made the gift


of a loving father. The late-arriving inheritance, consequently, signals Evelina’s successful participation in the creation of her own identity, crafted out of her educational legacies, as a woman of disinterest. In Evelina, just as tenderness begets tenderness, disinterest begets disinterest. The relation is similar to Jay Fliegelman’s description of the rewards of charity as understood by the moral sense philosophers: “To disinterested benevolence the debt of gratitude is paid involuntarily. It receives what it does not seek.”29 Henry Home Kames makes such an association, in his Elements of Criticism (1762), in arguing that acts of kindness inspire gratitude not just toward the benefactor but in general: “The feeling is singular in the following respect, that it is accompanied with a desire to perform acts of gratitude, without having any object … in such a state, favours are returned double.”30 Accordingly, Villars’ financial and educational gifts inspire a generalized gratitude in Evelina. She repays her debt not just to the author of her pedagogical being but to the impoverished Macartney and eventually Orville—the only other character described as disinterested. Lord Orville’s disinterest manifests itself as educational as well as economic, for it prompts what she calls his willingness to advise. In the end, Evelina’s disinterest in turn garners her what she in propriety never sought—social ascent through marriage and multiple inheritances. Evelina’s disinterest finds its fullest expression in her letters to Villars discussing her charity to Macartney, later discovered to be her illegitimate half-brother. She abandons her purse for his use after finding the man, a tenant of her relatives, in distress. She discerns that he is an appropriate object of benevolence, undeserving of the brutal treatment handed out by the crass and materialistic Branghtons, who hope in fact that he will starve so that they may claim his possessions as payment for back rent. Sacrificing her only money in an effort to restore the appropriate relations between character and property, she frees Macartney from his untoward obligation and rejects the contractual and legalistic ethos of her cousins. Her well-chosen charity earns Villars’ approbation, and he immediately replaces the money she has donated. Appropriately, the transaction duplicates Locke’s example of how to teach children liberality. In his Some Thoughts Concerning Education, he claims that parents should encourage children to give freely by immediately replacing what they spend and offering “great Commendation and Credit.”31 “Let all


the instances he gives of such freeness be always repaid, and with interest; and let him sensibly perceive, that the kindness he shows to others is no ill husbandry for himself; but that it brings a return of kindness, both from those that receive it, and those who look on,” Locke contends (Section 110). This is precisely Villars’ method when he offers both money and praise, credit toward her reputation within the family. When Evelina thanks him in her usual profuse manner, she recognizes that she is being rewarded for good conduct and must continue to earn such tokens of regard by demonstrating her ability to dispose of them properly, but not in anticipation of rewards. The money, in fact, earns her most extended and exuberant expression of filial love. Significantly, she emphasizes the extent of his generosity by reminding him that she is in fact not his biological daughter: Surely never had orphan so little to regret as your grateful Evelina! Though motherless, though worse than fatherless, bereft from infancy of the two first and greatest blessings of life, never has she had cause to deplore their loss; never has she felt the omission of a parent’s tenderness, care, or indulgence; never, but from sorrow for them, had reason to grieve at the separation! Most thankfully do I receive the token of your approbation, and most studiously will I endeavour so to dispose of it, as may merit your generous confidence in my conduct. (219) The gift is the quintessential symbol of familial love, the receipt of which negates even as it emphasizes her virtual orphanhood. It is crucial to note that Evelina perceives Villars’ gift not only as a reward for past conduct but an incentive to future goodness. The cycle does not end with his offering, itself a replacement for money she gave away charitably. She is to take his gift and dispose of it “as may merit your generous confidence in my conduct,” continuing a neverending transfer of money between parent, child, and charity case. She envisions herself not as the absolute owner of her freely earned money but as a caretaker, like Pamela Andrews, who must continue to demonstrate her liberality, in the position of a feudal tenant, but one whose propriety supports virtue. In dropping her purse for Macartney, Evelina is demonstrating her class solidarity (and, unknowingly, her familial ties) and her


sophisticated understanding of the affective economy on which her relationship with Villars is based. Equally important, she is practicing for her future role as Lady Bountiful, the noble distributor of charity, and the single most appealing image of a propertied woman in the eighteenth century. Lady Bountiful represents female disinterest operating in its most expansive and socially regenerative form. Every time Evelina’s potential ascent through marriage or inheritance is mentioned, her role as a charitable donor is suggested as an alternative to the more mercenary pleasures of her new role. Lady Howard argues that Evelina deserves paternal recognition because Villars’ education has taught her to “support and to use” wealth nobly, uses which clearly include charity (125). While Villars educates Evelina to be “the ornament of her neighbourhood” (118), Lady Howard believes that she is meant to be “an ornament to the world” (124). But paradoxically, her retired upbringing has crafted the perfect aristocratic daughter and wife, controlling but not owning important amounts of property. Indeed, Villars’ “peculiar attention” to her education has given her obliging manners and an excellent mind, opening the way through acknowledgement and marriage for “Fortune [which], alone, has hitherto been sparing of her gifts” (125). Her education into disinterest creates the propriety of this union of excellent character and a large estate. This understanding of the entwined roles of tenderness and disinterest in the affective economy provides new insight into an otherwise puzzling aspect of Burney’s novel: the inclusion of two dramatic reunion scenes with her father. When Sir John Belmont acknowledges Evelina but sends her away after their first short meeting, she demands that he meet with her again. Critics have expressed bafflement at the replay, crediting it to sentimental excess. Indeed, as Susan Fraiman notes, even the first scene is superfluous in terms of status and income, given that Orville proposes before her father legitimates her.32 Yet both scenes are indeed necessary. They allow for a distinction to be made between a legal and an affective economy among family members and to demonstrate Evelina’s recognition of the latter as the morally superior choice. The first encounter gains Evelina her estate but not a father. Soon after that meeting, Belmont acknowledges his paternity by giving her his name and endowing her with a portion, as Miss Selwyn tells her: “Sir John will give you, immediately, £30,000; all settlements, and so forth, will be made for


you in the name of Evelina Belmont” (378). That £30,000, if understood as a portion, is an extremely large endowment, equivalent to that of the self-satisfied Emma Woodhouse in Jane Austen’s novel, written almost forty years later. At the end of the eighteenth century, £20,000 was considered the standard portion for daughters of the wealthy with surviving brothers.33 Only daughters received perhaps 50 percent more, which may explain the increase, for Evelina Belmont is indeed Sir John Belmont’s only legitimate child.34 Still, that £30,000 portion, if invested in government funds, would generate roughly £1,500 a year, an amount of interest income that alone would place Evelina in the ranks of the carriage-owning and even attract “the disapproving monitors of consumer ‘excess.’”35 And if the usual conventions were followed, such a portion would likely induce Orville to settle on her a jointure worth £3,000 per annum, a “relatively lavish” amount.36 Evelina’s portion is large too in proportion to Belmont’s estate. Midcentury conventions dictated that portions for an only child equal roughly a year’s income on the paternal estate, so a £30,000 portion so figured would be pledged only by the greatest landowners.37 More likely, however, is that the generosity is meant to signal the extent of Belmont’s sense of guilt. The fact that the money is given “immediately” to her (or rather to Orville, for portions were the husband’s property) also implies a heightened sense of obligation on his part, for increasingly over the course of the century families delayed paying out portions upon marriage, making them instead payable upon the father’s death.38 Evelina would seem to have acquired all aspects of the paternal inheritance: name, status, and a large endowment. Significantly, however, she cannot accept his money simply as her legal right but must create a belated economy of tender exchanges in order to sanction his transfer of property. In insisting upon a second meeting with her father, she is seeking to prove to him that she will reimburse him for his emotional and economic outlays. By the end of the long scene, her tears and pledges do indeed force him to admit that she seems to be “formed for filial tenderness,” not filled with recriminations. “I see, I see that thou art all kindness, softness, and tenderness; I need not have feared thee, thou art all the fondest father could wish, and I will try to frame my mind to less painful sensations at thy sight” (385). Belmont soon after acknowledges her tenderness


with another monetary gift, a thousand pounds with which Evelina is to equip herself for her new rank in life. Fittingly, in response Evelina pledges to continue to fulfill her filial role, telling Villars her plan to offer gratitude and soothing ministrations. Evelina perceives the money as a gift, not a debt discharged, and accordingly necessitating a letter of thanks—unlike the £30,000 portion, which in fact will go to her husband, not her, and for which she never expresses gratitude. This pin money is the real endowment Evelina sought, for it certifies his favor as well as his obligation. Evelina Belmont Orville has scored big, her plot a fictional defiance of the real-life prospects for well-born women to inherit substantial land and property in the eighteenth century. As Fraiman notes, by ensuring her status, Orville’s proposal would seem to make Evelina’s bequest “belated and therefore useless.”39 In fact, however, the inheritance is crucial, for it ensures that Evelina does not enter marriage in affective debt. Prudent marriages required a closely analyzed proportion between the contributions of the two families to the new household; quite precise conventions developed relating the amount of portion to jointure, for example.40 Bringing money into marriage was not necessary only to placate mercenary or ill-natured husbands, conduct books make clear, but to provide some equality in the balance of power—to give value to the woman’s offerings of tenderness. The conduct book writer John Gregory left property to his daughters so that they would not feel overly indebted to their husbands, for example.41 The portion is the gold that backs the currency of affection. Evelina’s portion, consequently, allows her to enter into marriage as a “prudent” choice, not the recipient of unearned bounty. Indeed, in a little-noted passage before her first meeting with her father, she attempts to break off the engagement to avoid the oppression of such an arrangement: “I felt the nobleness of his disinterested attachment so forcibly, that I could scarce breathe under the weight of gratitude that oppressed me” (367). Despite her selflessness, Evelina like her predecessor Pamela is keenly aware of the value of objects on the marriage market as well as in the affective economy. She must know “to whom I most belong” before the day when the “grateful Orville may call [her] all his own!”—if she has any hope of calling anything her own (353). Another final financial transaction, briefly noted in the text, establishes the indirect nature of Evelina’s property rights, earned with


such difficulty. Her fiancé immediately cedes half her inheritance to Polly Green, the woman raised as Belmont’s daughter, a decision that reminds us that it is he, not she, who controls her portion. As a woman, she remains in peculiar circumstances. Under Roman law a “peculiar” referred to “the property which a father allowed his child, or a master allowed his slave, to treat as if it were his or her own,” a meaning in use until the early eighteenth century (OED). Evelina Orville will not be the absolute owner of herself or her legacy, but the manager of the family’s emotional economy. Appropriately, Villars recreates the affective economy as he imagines his death. He envisions Evelina’s extending his teachings—the lessons of the affective economy—into the next generation, “some yet surviving Evelina” to whom she will bequeath her educational estate (405). *** Burney’s first heroine is a young woman of uncertain birth who regains her name, her relatives, and her rightful property. The subtitle of her second novel immediately announces its difference. These “memoirs of an heiress” chart the coming of age of an orphan soon due to take possession of £10,000 from her parents as well as her uncle’s estate and its £3,000 a year. The obvious question for the experienced reader of the inheritance novel, or simply of Evelina, is what is the plot for the woman who already possesses “what all others built their happiness upon obtaining” (826)? The apparent answer is that Cecilia is Evelina in reverse: While Evelina is the story of an heiress ascending, Cecilia is the story of an heiress descending. Whereas Evelina accumulates protectors and names, Cecilia sheds them, along with her two bequests. Both works, however, ask one overriding question: Can disinterest survive in a commercializing society enamored of the modern pursuit of wealth yet clinging to feudal traditions to perpetuate class and gender disparities? The answer, surprisingly, is a highly qualified yes. While the selflessness that earns Evelina her restoration costs Cecilia her name and her estate, the heroine retains her benevolence and consequently the quality upon which she has imagined herself into being. Although Cecilia’s dispossession is a dismal commentary on women’s potential for retaining individual property rights, the plot allows Burney to narrate the culturally unimaginable—that the human capacity for


disinterest, typically cast as impossible, unnatural, or dependent on stable wealth, could survive its loss of funding and even serve as a potent educational tool. By robbing Cecilia of her inheritance, Burney dematerializes disinterest and consequently the heroine’s identity, undercutting the cynicism of the plot’s trajectory and anticipating the triumph, in the 1790s, of the notion of self as the product of memory rather than proprietorship. Cecilia’s expansive disinterest, while often dismissed as a conventional portrait of female virtue, should be recognized as a sustained counter-narrative to a brace of literary and cultural assumptions about gender, property, and identity. Contemporary critics complained about the length of Burney’s second novel, but it could be argued that the apparent repetitiveness speaks to the difficult of writing into existence an Heiress of Disinterest. Cecilia defies some of the period’s most persistent conventions: the presumption of women’s natural acquisitiveness and small-mindedness, the stereotype of the self-satisfied heiress who must be taught to dwindle into a wife, and the belief that wealth multiplies endless desires. (As Samuel Johnson argued in Rambler 38, “vanity and ambition open prospects to desire, which will grow still wilder.”)42 Her characterization also provides a counter-model to another familiar figure, one that plays a role in seemingly all the major novels of the eighteenth century— the indulged heir. Such a character is inevitably portrayed as banking on his secure or projected inheritance from a father or relative, never learning to restrain his passions and apparently incapable because of his secure wealth of feeling sympathy, perceiving justice, or recognizing the harm he causes with his gambling, tyrannizing, and womanizing. His wealth renders him uneducable, for he presumes, like Tyrrel in William Godwin’s Caleb Williams, that his identity is a birthright and his power assured. Cecilia instead suggests that an intellectually inquisitive woman, keenly aware of the implausibility of her wealth and the costs of its acquisition, can retain selflessness despite the lure of dissipation and vanity—and the loss of the estate that had inspired and supported her visions of benevolence. In Cecilia, then, Burney bolsters the implication in Evelina that disinterest, under siege by late century, may find its last resource in women. Whereas Evelina’s disinterest is the result of her education into the affective economy, however, Cecilia’s is fed by her sense of anomaly, as a woman of independent wealth. A female proprietor


such as Cecilia, who recognizes her position as aberrational, will be unlikely to regard wealth and status as absolute and inalterable properties, a personal entitlement rather than a social obligation, the novel insists. The “thousand sorrows” faced by women level the pre-eminence suggested by “riches, beauty, independence, talents, education and virtue” (937). An heiress only because an orphan, Cecilia regards the estate created by her farming forefathers as a special dispensation that incurs special duties. She vows to continue the tradition of disinterest begun by her father, who adopted the life of a country gentleman rather than seeking endless acquisition: He was “satisfied, without increasing his store, to live upon what he inherited from the labours of his predecessors” (5). Indeed, she extends her father’s model by imagining herself in the position of the disinterested landowner of the civic humanist ideal, viewing her fortune as “a debt contracted with the poor, and her independence as a tie upon her liberality to pay it with interest” (55). Unlike the stereotypical heir, Cecilia educates rather than indulges herself, sympathizes rather than tyrannizes, and feels gratitude rather than entitlement. She retains her receptiveness to instruction and teaches herself virtue. Cecilia’s mind, “copious for the admission and intelligent for the arrangement of knowledge, received all new ideas with avidity,” despite the endowment (and gender) that seemingly would have made such curiosity unnecessary (9). The heroine’s superior character consequently should be understood as the consequence of gender, though not of nature. Cecilia perceives her choices as evolving naturally out of family traditions, but her use of the language of modern commerce to envision herself in the ancient, quintessentially masculine role of benevolent landowner speaks to the contradictions in her position. The greatest obstacle to her disinterest is that it is constantly misconstrued in a society that interprets all actions in terms of gender and the laws of self-interest. In the eyes of most beholders, Cecilia is a fortune to be controlled and captured, “a mere nobody … till she can get herself a husband,” yet her uncle’s will dictates that she be the family somebody by bestowing her name upon her husband, and she herself presumes the modern right to independent thought and action (877). Her charity to the mis-educated, passionate Belville, based strictly upon her calculation of his deserving nature and long suffering, is persistently misread as a romantic interest; her forced


benevolence to her guardians the Harrels as flightiness; and her debts to moneylenders as the consequence of her pursuit of luxury. “Young women of ample fortunes, who are early independent, are sometimes apt to presume they may do everything with impunity; but they are mistaken,” intones Delvile senior, invoking the convention of the heiress who mistakenly believes her wealth overcomes the disabilities of gender (758). The variant forms in which “interests” were constructed in latecentury English society are, ironically, represented by Cecilia’s three legal guardians as well as her fourth self-appointed adviser. The Delviles, a family of ancient estate, have made lineage and rank their primary interest, even at the expense of increased wealth and marital happiness. The guardians with whom Cecilia initially lives, the Harrels, are interested only in conspicuous consumption. They allow the world to dictate their interests (extravagant entertainments, new carriages, and fine horses) and forget to do their own math. Cecilia’s third guardian, the miser Briggs, does nothing but the math. He is a caricature of the rational calculator, valuing only the creation of magic money through interest-bearing investments. The most damaging adviser of all, however, is the one she chooses for herself—Monckton—the quintessential “man of interest and of the world,” dangerous precisely because he positions himself as the wise and disinterested adviser (89). Cecilia initially accepts Monckton’s advice, but contrary to his understanding of their relation, presumes herself ultimately free to think and act for herself—to develop her own interests, independent (as an orphan) even of the obligations of filial devotion. Burney chooses an omniscient narrator to elaborate Cecilia’s elaborate self-construction, moving from the epistolary mode of Evelina. The shift is crucial to Burney’s project of exploring the potential for disinterest. First, the narrator has an independent voice with which to assure the reader of the reality of the heroine’s selflessness, which self-description always leaves open to question. Omniscient narration also provides Burney greater range for describing, and reflecting upon, the workings of Cecilia’s mind, allowing the author to portray the creative and complex manner in which the heiress imagines herself into being. In the transitional period before coming into her property, Cecilia anticipates the rewards of her role as Lady Bountiful and, intriguingly, the pleasures she will later reap from recalling her


acts of benevolence. She writes herself into existence by deploying what Peter Brooks considers narrative’s defining quality: the anticipation of retrospection.43 Initially, sentimental plots of benevolence rule her thoughts, in which she pictures herself saving the destitute and the victimized. Many and various, then, soothing to her spirit and grateful to her sensibility, were the scenes which her fancy delineated; now she supported an orphan, now softened the sorrows of a widow, now snatched from iniquity the feeble trembler at poverty, and now rescued from shame the proud struggler with disgrace. The prospect at once exalted her hopes, and enraptured her imagination; she regarded herself as an agent of Charity, and already in idea anticipated the rewards of a good and faithful delegate; so animating are the designs of disinterested benevolence! so pure is the bliss of intellectual philanthropy! (55–6) Burney dwells wryly on the entirely visionary pleasures of Cecilia’s plan, setting us up for the limits of her capacity, if not for the darkness of the tale to come. Intriguingly, as Catherine Gallagher notes, in this passage Cecilia is envisioning not only the good acts but herself overseeing those deeds. In indulging these fantasies, she is placing herself in the position of Adam Smith’s spectator, capable of moral analysis because self-divided. Whereas Gallagher sees this division as a form of self-effacement, however, I see it as self-construction. Cecilia is inventing herself as an Agent of Charity, pursuing the rewards of self-approbation rather than the ostentatious display of wealth.44 Notably, she imagines repaying her debt to the poor by saving women— widows and prostitutes—as if in recognition of the tenuousness of her own security. Cecilia projects; she also recollects, following a model for selfcreation that Locke inaugurated in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. The ability to recall one’s past actions, rather than corporal continuity or public confirmation, creates identity, Locke insists: “For since consciousness always accompanies thinking, and ’tis that, that makes every one to be, what he calls self; and thereby distinguishes himself from all other thinking things, in this alone consists personal Identity, i.e. the sameness of a rational Being: And


as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past Action or Thought, so far reaches the Identity of that Person.”45 Recollections of consciousness (it self as it self) create a sense of selfhood continual but bounded, separate from others and coherent to the remembering mind, despite dramatic changes in character and physical shape and independent, crucially, of others’ perceptions, as Margaret Anne Doody writes.46 Accordingly, in a passage in which Cecilia reviews her charitable acts, Burney emphasizes the delight she takes not only in giving money to an impoverished woman but in recalling the act. These are the pleasures suggested by Evelina’s assistance to Macartney or, in a later work, Camilla’s willingness to give her last guinea to a poor woman rather than gamble for a locket. In this novel, however, Burney dwells upon the heroine’s reconstruction of those moments. Notably, the language is that of sentimental fiction, suggesting the creative nature of Cecilia’s memories: To see five helpless children provided for by herself, rescued from the extremes of penury and wretchedness, and put in a way to become useful to society, and comfortable to themselves; to behold their feeble mother, snatched from the hardship of that labor which, overpowering her strength, had almost destroyed her existence, now placed in a situation where a competent maintenance might be earned without fatigue, and the remnant of her days pass in easy employment—to view such sights, and have power to say “These deeds are mine!” what, to a disposition fraught with tenderness and benevolence, could give purer selfapplause, or more exquisite satisfaction? (203–4; emphasis mine) Like Wordsworth anticipating the recollection of daffodils, Cecilia finds her recompense for her outlays in the happiness of returning, in memory, to “such sights” and recalling them as entirely her own. Her investment will reap a lifetime of rewards, for herself as well as for the shop-keeping mother. These passages, by depicting Cecilia’s fantastical visions, demonstrate how the heiress constructs an identity that survives her eventual disinheritance: When she owns nothing else, she will own her memory of her good deeds, and her recognition of herself as a woman who indeed would do such deeds. Her high-mindedness, unlike her other property, is inalienable. She


imagines herself capable of escaping social construction as a stereotypical heiress. Cecilia’s trials during her minority, paradoxically, also teach her a contrary lesson: her dependence upon proprietorship. An estate of her own, she comes to realize, signifies emotional liberty. In quitting her temporary homes for “a house which was her own for ever, or, at least, could solely by her own choice be transferred” she imagines an equivalent psychological freedom—that she will also be able “to empty her mind of the transactions which had passed in them, and upon entering a house where she was permanently to reside, to make the expulsion of her past sorrows, the basis upon which to establish her future serenity” (789, 790). The characteristic enabling the home to serve as an escape is not simply possession, but absolute possession, signified by the alienability that defines property as freehold. Just as Cecilia’s acts of charity require real money, her dream of selfpossession depends upon Blackstone’s sole despotic dominion, the rights that designate private possession. It is entirely appropriate, then, that Cecilia’s grandest act of disinterest—marrying and abandoning her name—renders her unrecognizable to herself and to others. When driven from her uncle’s estate, even her purse lost, she is locked up in a place of transitional objects, a pawnbroker’s shop, “wholly bereft of sense and recollection” and incapable of recalling “who she was, whence she came, or whither she wished to go” (898). Rather than producing memorable scenes for later consumption, she herself becomes a scene as servants, husband, father-in-law, and Albany parade past her bed to be struck with horror or remorse: “—is This she herself!— can THIS be Cecilia!” exclaims Albany, who has attempted, like Monckton, to direct her use of wealth, although his charitable visions accord with rather than violate her own principles (902). Despite the insistence of her father and her mentor Samuel Crisp, Burney refused to restore Cecilia’s estate in the concluding pages, wishing to differentiate her novel from “circulating library” fare in which “a marriage, a reconciliation, and some sudden expedient for great riches” inevitably concludes the story.”47 The heroine regains her memory and her extraordinary capacity for disinterest, but not her estate. Intriguingly, however, Cecilia’s disinterest in the final chapters is described as exerting a powerful influence that, as in Evelina, is signified by a realignment of property. Cecilia’s


“extraordinary sacrifice” not only wins over her mother-in-law, but dazzles a heretofore unmentioned aunt, who alters her will to leave to Cecilia’s sole disposal the fortune which had been destined for Mortimer (939). While painting a gloomy picture of the prospects for a woman’s retaining sole proprietorship of an estate, Burney does suggest that a Heroine of Disinterest, through suffering and sacrifices, can indeed gain dominion over minds, teaching the most hardened victims of Pride and Prejudice the higher value of a “generous and pure regard” (939). Disinterest serves as the finest instructor in the vicissitudes of life—a knowledge that women, because of their vexed property relations, possess easily. In his A Letter to a Deist, John Balguy argued that disinterest only qualifies as virtue if its rewards go uncalculated. Yet he saw no reason why (uncalculating) virtue should not be appropriately rewarded and presented in as enticing a form as possible. Balguy’s rather illogical argument (what is the point of portraying virtue rewarded if not to create the association between benevolent acts and pleasure?) corresponds to the apparent illogic performed by novels of inheritance such as Evelina and Cecilia. Indeed, his metaphors draw on the romance conventions favored by fiction, for he describes virtue as a lovely and wealthy bride. “Let Virtue be decked in all her Charms; let her be painted as lovely a Form as is possible; there is no Danger of the Pictures out-doing the Original. … what Reason can any Man have to strip her of her Dowry, and present her empty-handed?”48 These early novels of inheritance perform a similar act of intellectual acrobatics, presenting virtue in the form of a woman who refuses to calculate her interests, but inevitably receives the rewards she never sought.

3 Strategic Disavowals in A Simple Story

Fiction of the 1790s, both Gothic and radical, challenges the novel of inheritance, particularly the marital and financial triumph accorded the Heroine of Disinterest. Fittingly, Elizabeth Inchbald’s bifurcated 1791 novel inaugurates the confrontation with a narrative stalemate: the opposing tales of possession and dispossession in A Simple Story. The novel’s oft-noted structural difficulties reveal the fractures developing in the ideological bulwark maintaining women’s unequal property rights, while the unsatisfactory conclusions of its two consecutive stories interrogate the affective economy, displaying its disorderly workings and tallying the high emotional price paid by Heroines of Disinterest. In this Simple Story spanning two generations, nothing is simple, especially not the interest accrued on affective debts, which compounds exponentially across generations. Emotions direct and disorder the property exchanges—financial and affective, real and intangible—of lovers and beloveds, husbands and wives, fathers and daughters. Love, respect, anger, and fear not only dictate bequests but also act as forms of property exchanged, withheld or extorted, creating or stunting personal, familial, and gender relations. The commodification of emotion in Inchbald evolves out of the familial economy prescribed in conduct books and plotted in Evelina, Emmeline, and other works, but the text tracks its dangers and instabilities in a new way: A Simple Story is a tale not of smooth exchanges but of asymmetry and dissembling, demonstrating the confusion perverse human nature brings to the orderly transmission of properties material and immaterial, of estates and of education. This transitional text, consequently, previews the two directions into which the novel of 65


inheritance would splinter in the 1790s: the Gothic investigation of the psychology of disempowerment and the radical novel’s portrait of the bleak possibilities, in English society, for women and unpropertied men to gain economic and emotional independence. Critics have charged Inchbald’s two-generation novel, the successive stories of an heiress and of her dispossessed daughter, with both ideological and aesthetic failings. They lament the fate of the initial heroine, the passivity of the second, and the conventionality of the concluding lesson with which Inchbald attempts to yoke the stories together.1 While agreeing with Terry Castle that Inchbald’s split narrative signals something more significant than authorial miscalculation or faint-heartedness, I would like to argue that the rupture also says something important about the evolution of genre and its engagement with issues of female dispossession.2 We can attribute the structural oddities of A Simple Story to the author’s attempt, in Dianne Osland’s words, to represent the “seeds of change … lying largely beyond the reach of consciousness”—and as yet beyond fictional innovation.3 Indeed, I contend, the period’s contradictory concepts of female proprietorship necessitate Inchbald’s compulsive and inconclusive restaging of the female coming-of-age story. A Simple Story’s opposing heroines suggest that the novel of inheritance had reached an impasse, while the two halves provide a glimpse of the subgenres into which it was dividing. In the successive stories, the heroines are identical in appearance, age, and possibly name, and their stories share a narrative pattern of transgression and reward, as Castle argues.4 Yet the two stories are in different tonal registers: the first in the tradition of domestic realism, the second touched by the Gothic. The disjunction is jarring, but style conforms with content. Tellingly, in the last words of the novel, Inchbald attempts to unite the stories by invoking education—the theme that Alan Richardson describes as the overlooked bridge between the domestic and the Gothic.5 Inchbald summarizes the stories as contrasting parables concerning the relations between a woman’s property and her “proper education.”6 Although often criticized, Inchbald’s narrative suture is crucial to understanding the text, for it reminds readers that the two heroines’ property relations and their educations are mirror images and insists that the two themes be considered together. Consequently, it provides an important clue as to why the tales invoke starkly different genres.

Strategic Disavowals in A Simple Story 67

Miss Milner, the initial protagonist, is a frivolously educated schoolgirl, transformed, by her father’s will, into a wealthy woman. Her education and her propertied position endow her with an extraordinary sense of entitlement, an entitlement troped as vanity and displayed through her unquestioned delight in fashionable society. Her status and the setting of the plot in consumerist London— the vanguard of modern commercial relations and a “mecca for independent women”—lend themselves to the realistic social details and finely wrought psychology for which Inchbald has been praised.7 However, these essential details of plot and character also disqualify Miss Milner from the disinterest that, by the late eighteenth century, had become as essential as chastity to defining a heroine’s virtue. Breathtakingly defiant, Miss Milner flaunts her power with precise infractions of social rules, whether shopping compulsively, attending masquerades, flirting with multiple men or, most daringly, falling in love with a Father—the priest Dorriforth, who has been appointed her guardian and moral instructor. Miss Milner’s interior life is richly and subtly delineated, her wit and intelligence offered up for the pleasure of the readers, if not for the alarmed inhabitants of the novel. The plot handsomely rewards her defiance, as Castle argues. Although educated in a boarding school, she is to the city born, and she eventually gets what she should not want. After the priest Dorriforth inherits a family title and estate, he becomes Lord Elmwood and is released from his monastic vows to pursue the higher calling of dynastic preservation. The two marry—a seemingly conventional ending to an unconventional story. Miss Milner’s tale, then, is the anti-Gothic story of female empowerment, exactingly specific to its time and place in describing cards left, witticisms exchanged, and money spent. Miss Milner is no Heroine of Disinterest but an astute manipulator of the power of the purse. The heiress calls every ideological bluff, rejecting overt and implicit demands that she presume herself inferior because of youth or gender. Yet although Miss Milner’s tale ends in apparent triumph, Inchbald enacts a dizzying reversal. The third volume emerges in full Gothic regalia, beginning with the death of the “once gay, once volatile Miss Milner,” now an adulteress self-exiled to a “lonely country on the borders of Scotland, [in] a single house by the side of a dreary heath” (199). Attended by her weeping teenage daughter, Lady Elmwood is suffocating to death in the darkened dwelling, buried


alive and keenly aware of her fate: “In a large gloomy apartment of this solitary habitation (the windows of which scarce rendered the light accessible) was laid upon her death-bed, the once lovely Lady Elmwood—pale, half suffocated with the loss of breath; yet her senses perfectly clear and collected, which served but to sharpen the anguish of dying” (199). Inchbald’s realist novel of London masquerades and auctions has transformed into a Gothic nightmare of isolation and estrangement. That nightmare is bequeathed to the next generation. After Lady Elmwood’s death, her daughter is restored to her father’s care but only on the condition of a curse: She is banished to a wing of the ancestral home and threatened with complete disinheritance if she ever appears before him. A trapped woman tyrannized over by her father, deprived of her property rights, and pursued by an aristocratic rapist, Matilda can be recognized as the generic sister to the Radcliffean heroines who will dominate the 1790s.8 The heroine is prohibited from penetrating masculine zones yet driven by a desire to do so—another demonstration of the Gothic’s affinity for the Freudian, as E. J. Clery observes.9 While the bearer of the classic Gothic name and plot, Matilda also seems a throwback to the long-suffering but properly educated daughters of the sentimental domestic novel. Unlike her rebellious mother, she is a Heroine of Disinterest, willing to bankrupt herself emotionally before a stern patriarch and refusing to recognize the necessity even of corporeal sustenance. Whereas Miss Milner flaunts her power by buying unneeded china and unreadable books at auction, her daughter’s only economic acts are ones of denial. A “heart appendant to such a mind as Matilda’s,” we are told, is impervious to financial considerations, such as those a small-time baron would expect her to make when proposing to support her as his mistress (249). Like Evelina, Matilda refuses to consider the economic implications of her disinheritance, but dwells on the possibility of her father’s sustained affection: “If he does but think of me with tenderness … I am recompensed,” she assures her mentor. The mentor asks her then what recompense paternal love would provide were he to “turn [her] out to beggary.” She asserts her faith in the affective economy, implying that emotional outlays can replace economic ones: “A great deal—a great deal,” she replies (225). Like Evelina, the disinterested daughter eventually gains her father’s approval and


access to the familial estate, although she does so indirectly, through marriage to the appointed heir. Matilda, then, can be said to anticipate Radcliffe’s Gothicization of the Heroine of Disinterest. Not surprisingly, critics have dismissed Matilda’s story as an afterthought or an ideological retreat, citing the obedient daughter as atonement for the rebellious mother, the education plot as a tiresome convention, and the shift between the volumes as irredeemably awkward. Jane Spencer, for example, describes the second half as “an attempt to cancel out the boldness of the first,” while Anna Lott considers it “a revisionary complement.”10 Gerald Barker dismisses Matilda’s story as “derivative and conventional,” and Paula Byrne rejects the heroine and the education plot in a single line, describing Matilda as a “lacklustre heroine with none of her mother’s vitality … delicate, obedient, and of course ‘properly educated.’”11 Recently, Peter Mortensen re-deployed many of these elements in his analysis: “The fact remains … that Inchbald makes her bold assertions only to withdraw them; she gives with one hand while taking away with the other.”12 Notably, critics also are reluctant to investigate the full import of the Gothic overtones of Matilda’s story, as if anxious to protect the text from its own cross-purposes.13 Once we consider the primacy of property relations to eighteenthcentury Gothic, however, this tonal shift seems all but inevitable. It is not Matilda’s name, her castle home, or Oedipal desires that render her tale a Gothic one, but her dispossession.14 Legally, Matilda is precisely the creature the strict settlement newly excluded in favor of collateral males. She is the daughter of an heiress who leaves her nothing and of a titled father who replaces her in the line of succession with a male cousin. Recognizing the centrality of this dispossession allows us to recuperate Simple Story's neglected second half, recover an important stage in the transformation of property ideologies, and recognize how that transformation was generically manifested. Despite critics’ condemnation of the tonal disjunction between the two halves of the novel, it is only through the Gothic, I argue, that the text can investigate the consequences of Matilda’s disinheritance. E. J. Clery describes the Gothic as a genre encouraging “readers, particularly young women, to apply ‘illegitimate’ methods of interpretation to reality,” including their property rights. Indeed, she contends, Gothic indeterminacy “enables legal metaphor to be represented as a lived experience,” with women like Emily St. Aubert’s murdered aunts actualizing women’s


civil deaths under common law.15 In more general terms, Margot Backus argues that Gothic excess enables the indirect expression of suppressed truths, providing “a virtual compendium of the unauthorized margins of modernity’s mutating dominant order.”16 Robert Miles emphasizes the Gothic investigation of fragmentary subjectivity. Stripped of economic and social identity even as she inhabits unseen her father’s castle, Matilda is that being Miles describes as the ultimate Gothic: “the self finding itself dispossessed in its own house, in a condition of rupture, disjunction, fragmentation.”17 Intriguingly, the first half of A Simple Story, Miss Milner’s story, was likely drafted long before publication, as sentimental novels reached their apogee with Evelina in the late 1770s. By the 1790s, as E. J. Clery notes, sentimental complacency was transforming into Gothic disruption18; it was in the later period that Inchbald turned back to her abandoned manuscript, writing the second half of the novel. In its textual history as well as in its structure, then, A Simple Story follows the trajectory of the eighteenth-century novel’s increasingly anxious interrogation of the intersection of gender and property, moving from domestic realism to Gothic hyperbole as it transforms the story of the heiress into that of her dispossessed daughter. A Simple Story’s first half builds on the drama of Burney’s Evelina, taking its more benign view of female possibility to its logical conclusion; its second half indulges in the Gothic excess for which the 1790s would become known while also anticipating the dramatic exposé of women’s victimization to be found in the works of Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin, and the circle of radical writers associated with them.19 Published in the first year of the century’s traumatic closing decade, Inchbald’s first novel serves as a bridge to the Gothic’s dark emplotment of the perils and possibilities of women possessed and possessing. Accordingly, Inchbald’s bifurcated 1791 tale can be described as the cusp of the Gothic, anticipating Radcliffe’s great novels in its spectral investigation of women’s legal disabilities.20 Dispossession transforms Matilda into a Gothic Heroine of Disinterest. Possession, in turn, transforms her father Dorriforth into a Gothic tyrant, a powerful and angry paternal figure, like Horace Walpole’s Manfred, attempting to suppress the past by sheer force of will: “He was no longer the considerate, the forbearing character he formerly was; but haughty, impatient, imperious, and more than


ever, implacable,” we are told (230). Lord Elmwood’s transformation is usually attributed to his bitterness over his wife’s desertion or to Inchbald’s inability to realistically depict evolving character. But it must be noted that the lord stands in a different relation to property than did the priest: Earning the right to beget heirs, Lord Elmwood also is endowed with the trappings of feudal tyranny: money, power, and a household of fawning dependents. His new personality is described in how it affects those reliant upon him, suggesting his inability to serve as a benevolent master: “His temper is a great deal altered from what it once was—he exalts his voice, and uses harsh expressions upon the least provocation—his eyes flash lightning, and his face is distorted with anger on the slightest motives—he turns away his old servants at a moment’s warning, and no concession can make their peace” (223). Women turn pale and faint in his presence—or even at hearing his name. Now that he is called “my lord” by those around him, he demands the right to dictate reality to those below him: “I am not to be controlled as formerly; my temper is changed of late; changed to what it was originally; your scholastic and religious rules reformed it,” he tells his former mentor Sandford (214). Although he suggests that he is reverting to his natural personality, in fact Elmwood is now following the law of property. He recognizes that his title allows him to declare his own beliefs (whatever they might be) as right: If he and Sandford quarrel, he tells the priest, “You know it must be your own fault” (214). In his vengeful despair, the priesttutor has become a “hard-hearted tyrant … an example of implacable rigour and injustice” (195). Accordingly, as George Haggerty suggests, the novel at times exceeds generic expectations, with Lord Elmwood “more aloof and more implacable than any demon-lover in Gothic fiction” and utterly arbitrary and self-serving in his dictates.21 Elmwood’s emotions also become Gothicized because he loses faith in the affective economy, the ideal of family relations in which tenderness is exchanged for legal tender. To give his love, he imagines, would be to risk insolvency: Lord Elmwood believes he will be emotionally underpaid, receiving “ingratitude” rather than compensation for his demonstrations of tenderness (202). Moreover, while his wife is alive, he fears that she will somehow gain from his affective distribution: “To bestow upon that [child] his affections, would be, he imagined, still in some sort, to divide them with the mother” (197). Like great estates, emotions apparently are not partible.


Lord Elmwood is most Gothic not in his psychology, however, but in his rigid adherence to primogeniture and dynastic preservation. Elmwood Castle, the site of Matilda’s semi-imprisonment and abjection, is “first and foremost real estate”—a comfortable home she “in justice” should inherit, but which he in anger plans to leave to his nephew Rushbrook.22 Although Matilda’s disinheritance does not derive from Lord Elmwood’s desire to preserve his title, he does imply that a son would have held more sway. Even after he agrees to allow his daughter to live in an isolated wing of his manor, he rejects Sandford’s hint that he improve her fortunes: “I am not given to alter my resolutions … besides, will not my title be extinct, whoever I make my heir?—Could any thing but a son have preserved my title?” (214). His disinheritance of Matilda is made easier by her sex, which strips her of the power to preserve the family property. Lord Elmwood maintains his clear-eyed and gendered notions of proprietorship even after being “softened” by their eventual reconciliation, Inchbald tells us in a sentence characteristically ambiguous in judgment: “[H]e was more consistent in his character than to suffer the sudden tenderness his daughter’s danger had awakened, to derange those plans so long projected; and never for a moment did he indulge—for perhaps it had been an indulgence—the idea of replacing her exactly in that situation to which she was born, to the disappointment of all his nephew’s expectations” (334). Inchbald’s hedging “perhaps” invites the reader to decide for herself if bestowing an estate on a daughter is indeed an indulgence, either for the child or the besotted father. Notably, such awkwardness is characteristic of all of Inchbald’s attempts to sort out the relations between the heroines, their estates, and their educations. The rhetorical impasse is most apparent in the final words of the novel, in which Inchbald, reviewing the plots, asks readers to cast their minds back to the failings of Matilda’s frivolously educated mother and to the misguided generosity of Miss Milner’s father. We are told that “Mr. Milner, Matilda’s grandfather, had better have given his fortune to a distant branch of his family—as Matilda’s father once meant to do—so he had bestowed upon his daughter a PROPER EDUCATION” (338). With all the drama that uppercasing and indentation can provide amid the confusing familial relations and reductive resolution, the passage attempts to establish an instrumental relation between the heroines’ opposing fates and the legacies left them. In


this tortuous construction, proprietorship and proper educations are mutually exclusive, with Miss Milner’s inheritance causally linked to her frivolous instruction and Matilda’s praiseworthy tutelage— described in the previous sentence as being of “that school of prudence—though of adversity”—deemed somehow a consequence of her initial disinheritance (338). Intriguingly, patrilineal descent looms as the threatened alternative (those “distant branches”) that somehow, improbably, will ensure the more important success of female education. Although often disregarded as a bow to convention, like the characterization of Matilda, the passage is significant precisely because of its strained logic.23 The aggressive capitalization and strained reasoning betray the fractures in the fiction’s ideological claims, revealing the author’s uncertainty as to whether the phrase or the 300-page fable conveys a coherent moral. It also reminds us that the novel, like Evelina, is a prolonged investigation of the appropriate relay of emotional, financial, and educational goods between family members. The fates of two successive generations, Inchbald insists, have been dictated by bequests: the will written by Mr. Milner and the one unpenned by Miss Milner, who leaves her daughter’s fate to Lord Elmwood. To understand A Simple Story, then, we must investigate the implications of these two bequests. Structurally parallel, they drive the plot. On his deathbed, Mr. Milner leaves his entire estate to his seventeen-year-old daughter, but places her under Dorriforth’s guardianship in the hopes that the priest will belatedly teach her the necessity of suffering and the comforts of religious faith. Contemporary readers would have understood the bequest as a bourgeois decision to privilege paternal affection over the demands of estate preservation. Wills were precisely what the strict settlement sought to avoid. Men writing wills were presumed to be more likely to make “arbitrary” decisions, as H. J. Habakkuk notes in his treatise of the build-up of great estates. By arbitrary, he means a father’s following “the dictates of his personal affections or his own view of what was best for the family” rather than primarily considering customary rights and the desires of sons, brothers or uncles.24 Unlike premarital settlements, wills were often made at an emotionally vulnerable moment by a paternal figure likely to be more swayed by his affection for family members than his desire to keep the estate


in male hands.25 Moreover, because most major landowners strictly settled their estates by mid-century, wills of any sort (primogenitive or partible) were in practice bourgeois instruments, relegated to merchants whose mobile and uncertain wealth could not easily be determined a generation in advance.26 Mr. Milner’s bequest, then, characterizes him as a wealthy but untitled man ignoring the demands of class mobility in failing to ape aristocratic mores by ensuring patrilineal succession. Indeed, while loving in its motivation and intent, Mr. Milner’s bequest is disastrous in practice. He endows his daughter with economic independence but places her in a position of pedagogical dependency, creating an inevitable conflict. Miss Milner’s position as an heiress cannot be reconciled with her infantilized position as a girl and a “ward.” Although her youth and gender strip her of social authority, her father’s will (and her own) give her the standing of an absolute owner. She is the mistress of Milner Lodge, a position whose potency is recognized in the repeated attempts at erasure: Her father’s requirement that she live in rented rooms in London with her guardian suggests that he feels her incapable of becoming mistress of the manor, while Sandford’s objection implies that doing so would swell her sense of importance, which he is determined to quell: “Depend upon it, madam, I shall never enter a house where you are the mistress,” he declares amid one of their many struggles for dominance (239). Because of her inheritance, Miss Milner is the creature educational writers from James Fordyce to Mary Wollstonecraft inveighed against, for different reasons. She “habitually started at the unpleasant voice of control” and values her own beauty greatly, believing “those moments passed in wasteful idleness during which she was not gaining some new conquest” (15). She relies on feminine wiles to assert power, inspiring the illicit tenderness Fordyce condemned. Because of her assertion of power, Dorriforth fears that social credit will flow in the wrong direction, pedagogically as well as in terms of gender. As one of Miss Milner’s suitors, Lord Frederick, angrily notes, “The man who has the charge of Miss Milner … derives a consequence from her” (22). Indeed, Dorriforth’s irregular bouts of authoritarianism seem to be driven precisely by the fear of appearing, like their widowed landlady Miss Horton, a menial servant in Miss Milner’s wake. Their power battles arise directly from their complex and cross-gendered relations to property, as the aristocratic priest


living in lodgings attempts to assert control over a woman who is not only beautiful but also wealthy, the absolute owner of her dead father’s estate. Because of her wealth and power, Miss Milner is ineducable in the norms of female submission. Even before his unknown ward arrives at his lodgings “with all the retinue of a rich heiress,” Dorriforth fears that he will not be able to control his student, and his concerns arise from her status: “He knew the life Miss Milner had been accustomed to lead; he dreaded the repulses his admonitions might possibly meet from her; and feared he had undertaken a task he was too weak to execute—the protection of a young woman of fashion” (7, 6). Her characterization draws on the conventions of early modern drama and fiction. She is like Amoranda in Mary Davys’ The Reform’d Coquet (1724), whose parents’ early death “left her a finish’d Beauty and Coquet … [and a] Fortune too, being sole Heiress to three thousand Pounds a year.”27 Like Miranda in Aphra Behn’s The Fair Jilt (1688), she is beautiful as an angel and as stubborn as the devil. While she relishes her train of admirers, Miranda falls in love with a priest: “Her Youth and Beauty, her Shape and Majesty of Mein, and Air of Greatness, charm’d all her Beholders; and thousands of People were dying by her Eyes, while she was vain enough to glory in her Conquest, and make it her Business to wound.”28 Like these heroines, Miss Milner lacks the “self-assessment” of inferiority that enables submission, as Hobbes would suggest, instead displaying his larger truth of human nature: “there are very few so foolish that had not rather govern themselves than be governed by others.”29 Educability is created by overvaluation of others and undervaluation of self. Rousseau claimed it was knowledge of weakness that created educability; the advice to the tutor in Emile is simply this: “Let him know only that he is weak and you are strong, and by his condition and yours he is necessarily at your mercy.”30 Tutors rely on the student’s willingness to accept instruction and to credit the instructor with superior knowledge, yet the unequal exchange between teacher and student “may provide a credit that supplements the teacher’s ability to possess knowledge,” in Frances Ferguson’s phrase.31 Neither a child nor a dependent, however, Miss Milner is persistently unwilling to grant pedagogical power to her harsh guardian and the older priest—she refuses to overvalue their wisdom and their strength.


In describing Miss Milner’s education as a parental bequest, I draw on Ferguson’s description of the period’s increasingly materialized understanding of pedagogy. In the eighteenth century, according to Ferguson, “a view of education [develops] that makes the cultivation of the mind important in tangible terms; i.e., a good education may not be the exact equivalent of property, but … property is—or will be—its manifestation.” Over the course of the century, this concept manifests itself in writings in which wealthy parents are encouraged to view education as a commerce in intellectual property, but also in writings for the lower classes that “tended to allegorize education as the property you could own in the absence of any more substantial, i.e., real, estate.” A poor man’s intellectual attainments figure as his freehold property, she argues, citing a writer who applauded an activist by saying that “whatever mental acquisitions he possessed, he had absolutely at his control … whatever he did know, he knew perfectly, and he could call it up at will, at any time, in any place.”32 Ferguson’s analysis of how this concept mediates class begs to be extended to gender, for the idea of education as a property owned in the absence of real estate takes on particular relevance for women increasingly excluded from ownership. In the conduct books and educational treatises of the eighteenth century, a proper education is routinely considered crucial to a woman’s indirect access to property through marriage or bequest, for it endows her with the qualities necessary to earn affection and respect. Moreover, education creates self-possession in that it ideally gives a woman absolute control over that most unstable form of property—her reputation, customarily dependent on others’ credit. This self-possession in the 1790s novel becomes the illusory goal: a freehold property never attained and in fact feared as much as desired. Miss Milner, however, takes the man’s role in assuming that her absolute dominion over her inheritance gives her absolute control over her social identity; she is heedless, consequently, of the imperative to display herself as a properly educated daughter. Her defiant act of adultery must be recognized as her ultimate rejection of the implied contract of the affective economy, in which women earn their material support by displaying their educational receptivity and dispensing emotional gifts. She refuses to give, because she already possesses. It is therefore both appropriate and not altogether surprising that Miss Milner’s story, which begins with a bequest, ends with a bequest


denied. On her deathbed, the adulterous and repentant Lady Elmwood finds herself in the same position occupied by her father at the beginning of the story, when “all his cares [were] fixed upon her, his only child” (195). However, unlike Mr. Milner, she disinherits her child, whispering the multi-valenced word “Father”: “She had no will, she said, but what she would wholly submit to Lord Elmwood’s; and, if it were his will, her child should live in poverty, as well as banishment, it should be so” (203). Critics customarily read Lady Elmwood’s decision as a passive-aggressive assertion of appropriately feminine will-lessness or a late-arriving burst of conflicted propriety for the heroine if not for the author herself: She blazes into utter subordination.33 Within the larger context of this novel’s investigation of gendered property relations, Miss Milner’s blaze opens up to further interpretation. By forcing her estranged husband to provide for his daughter, Lady Elmwood hopes to set in motion the affective economy of exchange, in which transfers of property serve as “tokens” of love, a form of currency as well as a symbolic manifestation. Although the narrator (again) hedges with a “perhaps,” the next sentence establishes Lady Elmwood’s methods as deliberate ones, for she disowns her companion Miss Woodley as well because she “anxiously wished [that] this principle upon which she acted, should be concealed from his lordship’s suspicion” (203). To this higher principle she leaves those dear to her “but at Lord Elmwood’s pleasure, to be preserved from perishing from want” (203). Elmwood recognizes his dead wife’s final act as a strategic act of selfabnegation designed to force him to take responsibility for his daughter, financially and therefore emotionally, and responds with anger as well as shock: “No will at all? No will at all?” (207). Lady Elmwood’s refusal to leave behind a will demonstrates her sophisticated understanding of gendered conceptions of property and of the affective economy that mystified those unequal relations. By this act of abstention, Lady Elmwood returns herself and her daughter to a state of innocence in regard to property. Whereas Burney’s heroine expended tenderness to inspire a parent’s financial generosity, Lady Elmwood approaches the affective economy from the reverse direction, hoping that by forcing Lord Elmwood to support his daughter, he will be compelled at last to love her.34 Instead of transferring material wealth to her daughter, Lady Elmwood attempts to give Matilda sentimental credit to erase the debt that she, Lady Elmwood, incurred in the family economy and that her daughter


continues to pay off at loan-shark rates. Her final passive act is her mort main, a dead hand reaching out to control the future—the most frightening spectacle to estate lawyers as well as Gothic victims. The act of seeming subjugation is therefore appropriately introduced by defiance: “To every other prospect before her, ‘Thy will be done’ is her continual exclamation; but where the misery of her daughter presents itself, the dying penitent would there, combat the will of heaven” (195). Lady Elmwood’s refusal to bequeath is revealing in a legal sense as well as an emotional one, for it suggests that she owns her property outside the laws of coverture, as a separate estate. Only women whose property was legally separated from their husband’s, before marriage or after marriage with the husband’s approval, had the ability to make a will.35 Indeed, marriage for most women “was a time when the right to will property was ended; any will that had been published previously was automatically revoked.”36 In London, however, many more women were likely to make wills than elsewhere, suggesting city women’s greater financial independence.37 In refusing the masculine privilege of dictating the disposition of an estate, Miss Milner abandons a decidedly masculine privilege, eschews her London past, and reveals to readers that her father had indeed left her entirely independent. Disappointingly to modern readers, by disinheriting her daughter, Lady Elmwood also suggests that she has overcome her improper education. In the name of her daughter she acts with utter propriety. Yet paradoxically, in denying her daughter wealth, she bequeaths her educational property, ensuring that Matilda will be raised in “that school of prudence—though of adversity” of which the mother was ignorant (338). Lady Elmwood’s maternal sins increase her daughter’s educational receptivity as well, we are told. Matilda accords her father that disproportionate credit Ferguson described as crucial to the pedagogical relation: Because “perfectly acquainted with the whole fatal history of her mother” she feels “that respect and admiration of her father’s virtues which they justly merited” (216). By raising the question of proportion, Inchbald invites the reader to consider the excessiveness of Matilda’s regard. Matilda’s one memory of her father models the property relations to which she seeks restoration: “She was just three years old when her father went abroad, and remembered something of bidding him


farewell; but more of taking cherries from his hand as he pulled them from the tree to give to her” (221). In an appropriate act of paternal condescension, he transfers just the sort of property a child would value; the tender act materializes his favor in the fruit off his land. The choice of fruit is an intriguing one, for education theorists commonly imagined cherries as a fitting reward for children’s successes. Locke in his Some Thoughts Concerning Education proposed children winning “cherries or apples” in games designed to teach the alphabet (Section 53). A century later, Maria Edgeworth has the well-educated children in the Percival household of Belinda distributing cherries as proud manifestations of personal property. In Thomas Day’s Sandford and Merton (1783), the poor boy Harry is rewarded with a bowl of cherries after gardening industriously; his friend Tommy, too proud to wield a hoe, is left hungry, to demonstrate the Lockean lesson that labor earns property. Matilda’s early memory suggests her willingness to labor pedagogically in the tradition of the affective economy, like the obedient children in Locke, Edgeworth, and Day, thereby earning her just rewards. Matilda’s propriety is further suggested by her unquestioning acceptance of her father’s stipulations for supporting but isolating her. Sandford, eager that she be educated in that school of adversity, repeats every harsh dictate, “not even sparing, with an erroneous delicacy, any of those threats her father had denounced, should she dare to break through the limits they prescribed—nor did he try to soften, in one instance, a word his lordship uttered” (218). It is such knowledge, in fact, that completes Matilda’s character and prepares her, unlike her mother at the same age, to withstand “the cold nipping frost of disappointment, sickness, or connubial strife” (4). She is an ideal blend of the masculine and the feminine, as suggested by a passage noting her physical resemblance to her mother but insisting that “her mind and manners were all Lord Elmwood’s; softened by the delicacy of her sex, the extreme tenderness of her heart, and the melancholy of her situation” (220). Matilda has the fortitude of her lordly father, uninflected by the frivolity and extravagance of her mother—or the rage and self-absorption of her father. Because dispossessed and a daughter, she overcomes the failings of both parents. Her strong character, then, is an odd blend of the qualities presumed innate in women (the “delicacy of her sex”) and the “melancholy” experience in suffering prescribed by convention and law.


It is fitting, accordingly, that Matilda’s awe is described both as the natural response of a young girl to her inaccessible father and the consequence of her dawning awareness of the extent of his wealth— and her own uncertain relationship to it. When she is first taken to his estate, she feels oppressed by “an awful, and yet a gladsome sensation no terms can describe” (219). The mixed emotions increase as she views the landscaping and contents of the fine manor: “As she passed along the spacious hall, the splendid staircase, and many stately apartments, wonder! with a crowd of the tenderest, yet most afflicting, sentiments rushed to her heart” (219). She is astonished to discover her relationship to such riches: “‘And is my father the master of this house?’ she cried—‘And was my mother once the mistress of this house?’—Here a flood of tears relieved her from a part of that burthen, which was before insupportable” (219). The sublime is inspired not by divinity but by expansive halls and rooms, luxuries that have been denied her for many years. When Sandford insists she is indeed mistress of the house (“till your father arrives”), she demands again if she will have the honor of sleeping under the same roof with Elmwood, and is reminded that she has been told so many times. Her response: “‘Yes,’ said she, ‘but though I heard it with extreme pleasure, yet the idea never so forcibly affected me as at this moment—I now feel, as the reality approaches, this has been kindness sufficient—I do not ask for more—I am now convinced, from what this trial has made me feel, that to see my father, would cause a sensation, a feeling, I could not survive’”(219–20). Matilda is impressed both with a sense of loss—to her and her mother—and with her father’s “awful” power over her and others. She responds to these emotions by expressing a disproportionate respect for her father and gratitude for his “kindness” in sharing his estate with her. Accordingly, she concludes that she could not survive even the sight of so powerful a man, capable (though not willing) of paternal kindness in proportion to his paternal prosperity. Her response is what Robert Miles describes as the female Gothic sublime, a mix of “masochism, hierarchical authority and Oedipal conflict.”38 It is no wonder that she faints (and he calls her by her mother’s maiden name) when she confronts Elmwood (fittingly) on that splendid staircase. She is the ghost in his machine, the daughter he wishes to dispossess, affectively and economically, and she has determined that to survive means to remain a specter.39


Matilda is a Heroine of Disinterest in her humility, her exceeding tenderness, and her educational receptivity, signified by her overvaluation of her father and undervaluation of her own economic and emotional needs. Although A Simple Story is darker in tone than earlier works, including Evelina, the heroine’s selflessness is again financially rewarded, although indirectly, through a marriage of uncertain prospects to the cousin who has replaced her as heir. Indeed, in this work, Matilda’s acceptance of her cousin Rushbrook seems more a testament to her continued disinterest than a romantic triumph. The entire transaction has a fairy tale quality that sharply limits her agency. Her father, after restoring her to his heart but not his will, empowers her to offer her cousin an unspecified “gift” she fails to recognize as herself (336). Now the proud possessor of she knows not what, she comes into the room “nimbly” to find her cousin, offering to comfort him by giving him whatever he has asked of her father. He immediately recognizes the problem as one of ownership, the presumed inability of the young lady to give herself away—the right to transfer property being the clearest indicator of absolute ownership in the “bundle of sticks” traditionally considered to constitute that right. Accordingly, he proceeds carefully and by indirection. “I have asked for that,” replied he, “which is dearer to me than my life.” “Be satisfied then,” returned she, “for you shall have it.” “Dear Matilda! It is not in your power to bestow.” “But his lordship has told me it shall be in my power; and has desired me to give, or to refuse it you, at my own pleasure.” “O Heavens!” cried Rushbook in transport, “Has he?” “He has indeed—before Mr. Sandford and Miss Woodley.—Now tell me what your petition is?” “I asked him,” cried Rushbrook, trembling, “for a wife.” … “I boldly told him of my presumptuous love, and he has yielded to you alone, the power over my happiness or misery.—Oh! do not doom me to the latter.” (336–7) We are left in a characteristic limbo with the conclusion of the scene: “Whether the heart of Matilda, such as it has been described, could sentence him to misery, the reader is left to surmise—and if he


supposes that it did not, he has every reason to suppose their wedded life was a life of happiness” (336–7). The odd intermingling of legal and mythic language highlights the peculiarity of this pseudo-heiress being given the right to give herself away. Like a classic piece of folklore, however, the genie’s granting of unusual power carries a dangerous twist. What had initially seemed a boon to Matilda, the right to donate a portion of her father’s goods to comfort her cousin, reveals itself as a trick. By leading her to believe her task would be to decide if Rushbrook deserved some tangible good—money, perhaps—her father has placed her in a difficult situation, forced to listen privately to Rushbrook’s proposal of marriage. The reader, too, suffers from the genie’s cleverness, as the narrator withdraws at this crucial moment in the plot. Given “the heart of Matilda,” we might well presume that her feminine sensitivity precludes her making so masculine a judgment as to “sentence him to misery,” but the narrator relieves herself of the obligation to decide, transferring that dubious right to the reader, who is also aware that Matilda’s “mind and manner” are those of Lord Elmwood. Inchbald places the reader in Matilda’s position, forced into temporary ownership of the plot and presumably likely, because of the same susceptibility, to choose the conventional happy ending—yet also forced to recognize the possibility that such a marriage might not indeed lead to “a life of happiness.” The reader, like Matilda, will know the right answer if properly educated in property relations. I have just suggested that Matilda’s proper education dictates her equivocally happy ending. Ironically, though, it would seem that the marital solution to her disinheritance ultimately depends not so much on her education as on Rushbrook’s. The Rushbrook subplot, accordingly, is another way in which the novel subtly undermines Matilda’s agency. Indeed, although Matilda is often seen as Miss Milner’s ineffectual replacement in the novel’s second half, it is Rushbrook who serves as the initial heroine’s narrative twin: A warmhearted, spontaneous and artful dissembler of natural grace and beauty, he, like his female benefactor, finds himself at a young age under the control of Lord Elmwood, anxiously attempting to prove his worth to the imperious man. An heir like Miss Milner, he is confronted by the lord’s demands that he not bestow his heart without his permission and an evasive scene in which he finds he cannot answer his questions about his emotions. And like his benefactor


Lady Elmwood he persists in bestowing his affections on the one forbidden object: Not Lord Elmwood but Lady Matilda Elmwood. Like Miss Milner, Rushbrook attempts to manipulate a dangerously unstable affective economy, keen to both emotional and economic expenses and the relations between them. In one intriguing scene, Matilda and Sandford debate whether Rushbrook, by stealing Lord Elmwood’s affections, is responsible for her disinheritance: “‘I do not say he is the absolute cause,’ returned Sandford; ‘but if a parent’s heart is void, I would have it remain so, till stored by its lawful owner—a usurper I detest.’ ‘No one can take Lord Elmwood’s heart by force,’ replied his daughter, ‘it must I believe, be a free gift to the possessor; and as such, whoever has it, has a right to it’” (280). Sandford sees Rushbrook as an unusual form of thief, one who steals from the store by pre-emptively stocking its shelves with his own goods; a usurper who prevents the heart’s “lawful owner” from inspiring the affection that will become materialized in inheritance and paternal ownership. Matilda in turn imagines her father as an absolute owner of his affective wares, incapable of suffering losses against his will and donating affection in a lordly fashion, as gifts. Whereas Sandford sees Elmwood’s heart as stolen goods, Matilda imagines it as inalienable property—and consequently in dubious relation to the affective economy by which tenderness is exchanged for inheritance. Rushbrook would seem to agree with Sandford; like a guilty thief, he attempts to redirect Elmwood’s emotions and his estate toward his daughter. Indeed, Rushbrook’s love seems born of a desire to redistribute property. Brought into the home as a child by Lady Elmwood, Rushbrook decides after her death that the most impressive way to show his gratitude is to serve as the vessel through which her daughter regains her rightful property. He feels extreme discomfort that his visits to Elmwood Manor place “the daughter of his benefactor as a dependant stranger in that house, where in reality he was the dependant, and she the lawful heir” (258). He construes Matilda as the “lawful heir” when in fact he means “rightful heir,” for Elmwood has the legal right to bequeath his property however he desires. Morality not legality determines that the daughter should inherit from the father, Rushbrook implies. Rushbrook also recognizes in the “grandeur of her mien” the character of an heiress; indeed, his recognition of her worth elevates his respect for her father—he feels


a “new esteem and regard for him, for his daughter’s sake”—and inspires him to wish to direct Elmwood back to propriety even at his own expense: “He gazed with wonder at his uncle’s insensibility to his own happiness, and longed to lead him to the jewel he cast away, though even his own expulsion should be the fatal consequence” (240–1). As in the novel’s first half, Lord Elmwood receives social credit from his relationship to a beautiful young woman. Rushbrook openly debates the oddity of his affection for Matilda, “arising from causes independent of the object itself” (250). “Did I not love Lady Matilda before I beheld her?—for her mother’s sake I loved her—and even for her father’s.—Should I have felt the same affection for her, had she been the child of other parents?—no” (250). He acknowledges too that pity along with gratitude excited his affections, suggesting that it is her disinheritance that compels his heart to love: “Or should I have felt that sympathetic tenderness which now preys upon my health, had not her misfortunes excited it?—no” (250). He concludes finally that gratitude to her parents, pity for her misfortunes, and admiration of her appearance combine to produce a love so strong that he is willing to defy his own self-interest in declaring it to Lord Elmwood: “He had loved Lady Matilda, in whatever state, in whatever circumstances” (250). Tenderness toward mother and daughter inspire the heir to act with something akin to disinterest, endangering his fortune by defying Lord Elmwood; like Miss Milner’s, however, his transgression is rewarded in a last-minute reversal that restores his affective and financial estate. A version of the Evelina plot rewritten with a Gothic pen, Matilda’s story fails to conclude with an overt distribution of happiness: The disinherited Matilda, while empowered to give her heart to her cousin, makes the gift because she lacks the emotional strength to refuse it. Her proper education guarantees her success in the form of access to the paternal estate and a presumed “life of happiness,” but the reality of that happiness is purposefully left ambiguous, and her inheritance regained only indirectly. It is an appropriately uncertain ending to Inchbald’s vexed exploration of possession and female identity. As in Burney’s Evelina, tenderness appears to resolve the injustices of a highly gendered property system, but in this novel the tone is anything but celebratory and the resolution unstable. Inchbald’s A Simple Story structurally replicates the evolution of the eighteenth century novel’s investigation of female proprietorship, evolving out


of the sentimental realism of mid-century into a Gothic-tinged tale that anticipates Radcliffe and Wollstonecraft by exposing the high emotional and economic costs paid by the Heroine of Disinterest. Ultimately, the ending suggests, inheritance law was indeed as William Blackstone famously described it, “a Gothic castle, erected in the days of chivalry,” though not, as he concluded “fitted up for a modern inhabitant” (Bk 3, Ch. 17).

4 Gothic Properties

The Gothic novel can be considered the narrative equivalent of what psychologists call an extinction burst: the final lavish display of a fading behavior—in this case, the English tradition of according agency to property. An example of an extinction burst is a child’s loud and extravagant demand for bedtime attention just before falling into exhausted sleep. The frantic behavioral burst signals desperate defiance but also, to the astute observer, the beginning of the end. Accordingly, as a modernizing economy undercut the primacy of the estate, it is fitting that in fiction castles erupted into hideous agency, as if to assert property’s dying power. In Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764), the estate animates to restore aristocratic proprietorship. Statues and portraits vivify to dispossess the wrongful lord; an ancestral spirit shudders forth to fling a giant helmet upon his hapless teenage son. Walls and tunnels crumble fortuitously as women and the rightful owner flee men seeking their bloodlines or bequests. Similarly, in Clara Reeve’s 1778 Old English Baron, recesses groan and closets echo with the sounds of ancient crimes, clues to another murderous usurpation; castle doors fling open to welcome home the foundling heir. Scholars including E. J. Clery accordingly deem the castle the real protagonist of the Gothic novel and the “control of property over people” the primary theme of works such as Otranto.1 In the Gothic, vivified estates mercilessly enforce a providential law of inheritance, restoring rightful owners while taking out not only the evil-doers but often their wives or children. In so doing, they represent the consequences of a newly airtight regime of primogeniture, in which property becomes, in Henry Home’s description, 86

Gothic Properties 87

a “mortmain, literally speaking, the dead hand of the past weighing on the present.”2 To this description of the Gothic as literalizing the strict settlement’s long generational reach, Tim Dolin adds the element of defiance of modern forms of proprietorship. In fiction, the estate takes concrete form while in economic reality, innovations such as stocks and copyright were rendering property “increasingly abstract” and depriving land of its paradigmatic status.3 If the Gothic—beginning with Walpole—is a representational burst of activity defiantly asserting the estate’s power over people, Ann Radcliffe’s 1790s novels signal the dramatic extinction of the ancient alliance of property and identity. In Radcliffe, mansions and castles continue to be alarmingly interactive and imprisoning. Yet while the locked chambers, veiled recesses, and obscured portraits terrorize the heroine, they also contain suppressed truths that ultimately release and enrich her. When the wind-blown candle is relit, property shrinks to size, resolving itself into a collection of deeds to be sold, bestowed, or retained by a newly self-aware heroine. Mysteries of ownership drive Radcliffe’s stories, but the resolution of proprietorship no long determines subjectivity, which the heroines craft out of experience and reflection. The heroine frees herself from property’s dictates, taking charge of her own identity and bringing men and estates into submission to her benevolent will. In famously explaining away the supernatural, then, Radcliffe’s narratives can be said to extinguish property’s long-held status as the secular equivalent of fate. They overwrite the aristocratic ideology of property and create a new trajectory for self-development, putting property back in its place as a tool rather than agent.4 The castle is no longer the most striking character in the text, and it is character that gives meaning to property, not property that gives meaning to character. This chapter, then, argues that Radcliffe’s plots create a model of identity formation related to property, but not dependent upon proprietorship, by depicting a newly elaborated model for refining disinterest. Radcliffe’s protagonists follow in the tradition of the Heroines of Disinterest and of sensibility, repeatedly displaying their fortitude, compassion, and altruism. Like their fictional predecessors, The Italian’s Ellena (1797) and Emily in The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) refuse to marry their beloved without the consent of elders, and Emily’s suffering and triumph turn on a misdirected inheritance. Unlike in earlier works, however, these novels not only display the


heroines’ disinterest but also chart its growth, following a model that tracks Adam Smith’s analysis of the stages of ethical spectatorship while also positioning memory as a form of self-creation. The novels investigate the possibilities for selflessness in plots that illuminate virtuous characters’ expanding emotional range, the imperviousness of the wealth-obsessed to sympathy and moral feeling, and the failings of good-hearted but weak characters to put their moral knowledge into practice. Like the traditional Heroine of Disinterest, Radcliffe’s female protagonists are eminently educable, but they wrest control of that education away from their tutors, tyrants as well as overprotective parent figures. Crucially, in Radcliffe, only those who are active managers of memory achieve the highest form of virtue. The heroines learn to overcome repression and superstition and to contextualize their experiences within a rediscovered history: the truth of ancient crimes, the discovery of lost mothers, and the recovery of lost estates. This process is most clearly realized in Udolpho but also suggested in Radcliffe’s other works, particularly The Italian. The heroine, forced out of her Edenic childhood into a world of tyrants, banditti, rapists, and robbers, cannot comprehend the evil parading before her. Typically, she freezes before “nameless terrors,” faints into unconsciousness when the knowledge of evil becomes unavoidable, and leans desperately and reluctantly on superstition to explain the truths she cannot integrate into her worldview (Udolpho, 240). In between imprisonments in castles, she travels and observes, increasing her emotional range by responding to the sublime and terrifying landscape. The pedagogical power of emotions is carefully parsed. While horror inspires repression, terror is educational, inspiring the pursuit of knowledge in spite of fear; the narrator of Udolpho assures us: “as it occupies and expands the mind, and elevates it to high expectation, [it] is purely sublime, and leads us, by a kind of fascination, to seek even the object, from which we appear to shrink” (248). Gradually, rather than retreating or suppressing horrifying truths, as their elders did before them, the heroines transform painful experiences into pedagogical touchstones—symbols of meaning, morality, and action that replace inadequate or dangerous paternal instruction and serve as emblems of maturity. As in Locke, Hume, and Rousseau, sophisticated powers of recall signify the transition


from childhood to adulthood, from student to potential teacher. Significantly, the heroines’ maturation is signified by their Lockean ability to “order their possessions”—mentally as well as physically.5 By novel’s end, the heroines’ synthesis of personal and historical memory is embodied in the estate they inhabit. The marital home is the external manifestation of internal, self-created character, not the realization of status handed down by the elders, because it has been earned through intellectual as well as psychological labor. It is the material sign of their disinterest. The property transactions and marital decisions that conclude the novels are the heroine’s performance of her unique memory-property; they signal her reconciliation of a restored past with a self-created future. Locke’s theory of memory’s role in identity formation and its enactment in the early novel have been credited with enabling the eighteenth-century relocation of character from external to internal, from fixed to flexible, and from imposed to self-created.6 In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke defines a person as “a thinking intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider it self as it self, the same thinking thing in different times and places.”7 Mental awareness rather than corporeal continuity or public confirmation shapes subjectivity, Locke insists. Consciousness, construed as memory’s creation, subsequently becomes “the hero of every tale” of Enlightenment selfhood, enabling the model of the active, responsible agent crucial to republican government and capitalist ideology, as Margaret Anne Doody argues.8 Lockean concepts were “regularly implicated in what we mean by the internalization of experience, the psychologization of everyday life that we connect with modernity” and with the narrative form of the novel, as Frances Ferguson summarizes.9 Larry Wolff, similarly, connects Lockean memory theory, extended in the philosophies of David Hume and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, with the rise of the memoir form and the modern concept of childhood. The maturation of Rousseau’s Emile is signified by the boy’s ability to manage his recollections; the tutor directs his encounters with the world until the “creature of sensation … becomes a person of memory and imagination.”10 If analyzed in the context of Locke’s labor theory, such constructions suggest that creative recollections become a form of intellectual property. In his Second Treatise, Locke provides a series of anecdotes describing a man, in the state of nature, acquiring food. He seeks to


establish what he considers the common-sense implication that the labor of acquisition is the most important factor in creating ownership: He that is nourished by the acorns he picked up under an oak, or the apples he gathered from the trees in the wood, has certainly appropriated them to himself. Nobody can deny but the nourishment is his. I ask then, when did they begin to be his? when he digested? or when he ate? or when he boiled? or when he brought them home? or when he picked them up? and it is plain, if the first gathering made them not his, nothing else could. That labour put a distinction between them and common: that added something to them more than nature, the common mother of all, had done; and so they became his private right. (Sec. 28) If we accept that in Locke any “purposeful action” constitutes labor, the toil of acquiring and remembering experience equates surprisingly well with the labor of consumption.11 Recalling an event, like tending land, can be said to “mix” mental toil with experienced reality, forming a new and individual possession, just as manual labor invested in common property creates private land in Locke’s theory. That intellectual property, unlike tangible property, has the advantage of being endlessly transferable and reproducible: at their most effective, narratives of experience are communicated and acted upon, becoming indirect but internalized experiences for others as well as for the recollecting self—that is, educational bequests. A Gothic rewrite of Locke’s passage suggests the parallels: She that is nourished by the memories she picked up in a convent, or gathered in a mountain pass, has certainly appropriated them to herself. Nobody can deny but the recollection is hers. That labour put a distinction between them and common: that added something to them more than nature, the common mother of all, had done; and so they became her private right. Radcliffe’s novels, I contend, invoke two forms of memory commonly juxtaposed: Lockean or Enlightenment concepts that consider memory as the basis of a stable understanding of self and Romantic theories emphasizing memory’s creative and mutable properties. Frances Ferguson links the former to what she describes as the


receding fantasy of pure history: the faith in the possibility of retrieving an absolute and inalterable record of an event, confirmable by the testimony of others. Romantic ideals, however, privileged memory for its particularity and creativity. Rather than representing a dilemma, Ferguson notes, variations among individuals’ memories provide the contours of the unique self in the Romantic conception, pushing to its limits the Lockean implication that recollection is an act of selfcreation and an assertion of self-possession. “Memory … seems thus to become not what all possible observers would confirm but instead a process of internal matching, in which memory or its formal simulacrum qualifies an individual to count as his own corroboration.”12 Perfect recall of specific events is less important to subjecthood than is “the possibility of reflexiveness itself, for a faculty of mind that can only imperfectly be translated into public law or be received from the testimony of others.”13 Intriguingly, the “absent ideal” of pure history undergirds William Blackstone’s description of investiture, the feudal ritual for transferring property rights.14 The ritual, in which a vassal kneels before his lord, was designed to maintain proper ownership by burning an indelible image of the transaction in the minds of witnesses, he says: The “open and notorious delivery of possession in the presence of the other vasals, [sic] … perpetuated among them the era of the new acquisition, at a time when the art of writing was very little known: and therefore the evidence of property was reposed in the memory of the neighbourhood.” If title was disputed, he specifies, the witnesses would be “called upon to decide the difference, not only according to external proofs, adduced by the parties litigant, but also by the internal testimony of their own private knowledge” (Bk 2, Ch. 4). History may be pure, but memory is a legal tool, ensuring title. Notably, in relying upon community recollections to secure property, the feudal ritual construes dominion as a public rather than a private matter. Possession requires the consent not only of the grantor but also of others who might otherwise ignore the right to dominion, modern theorists like to say—a truth intrinsic to feudalism but suppressed by a capitalist ethos that imagines dominion as the relation between a person and a thing. When considered in the context of Blackstone’s description, Radcliffe’s novels can be said to bridge the transition from feudal to modern forms of identity in their handling of memory. The novels


draw on the “pure history” model when their plots depend on the recovery of historical or personal facts: the true parentage of a heroine or the rightful owner of an estate; the real cause of someone’s death or disappearance; or, more generally, the suppressed story of family relations. They develop the Romantic ideal in privileging and narrating the individual’s power of creative recollection. It seems appropriate in retrospect, then, that Blackstone uses the metaphor of the Gothic castle for British property law, “fitted up” for modernity. Crucial to this fitting up, in Blackstone’s eyes, is absolute dominion, ownership with clearly defined and limited rights and duties, which supplanted feudalism’s “more honourable but more burdensome knight-service” (Bk 2, Ch. 5). In moving from the affective economy of the domestic novel to the self-proprietorship of the Gothic novel, Radcliffe’s heroines can also be seen as moving from the more burdensome tenure of services that, for women, included continual emotional and psychological demands. Radcliffe’s novels systematically undermine the fantasy of paternal benevolence and pedagogical omniscience and expose the dangerous asymmetries in the affective economy, which fed upon women’s economic high-mindedness, educational receptivity, and excessive filial piety. Blackstone finds that understanding property requires understanding the Gothic; so, indeed, must we understand the Gothic novel to understand the changing relations between property and subjectivity in the late eighteenth century. In Radcliffe, memory of suffering—personal, historical, and familial— maintains disinterest by continually reinforcing the characters’ awareness of competing interests, multiple subjective stances, and the human costs of injustice. Consequently, it is experience recollected that helps them cultivate the highest form of virtue suggested by Adam Smith’s theory of moral judgment, derived from the tradition of sensibility. Rejecting Mandevillian theories claiming self-interest as the motor of human behavior and regarding disinterest as irrelevant, impossible, or deceitful, philosophers including the Earl of Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson posited selflessness as a natural impulse. Shaftesbury’s Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711) describes human beings responding involuntarily and instantaneously to another person’s actions or emotions with “Admiration and Extasy, [or] its Aversion and Scorn,” reactions that guide their analysis of those actions as virtuous or detestable.15


Hutcheson, similarly, posits a natural benevolence that generates pleasurable feelings. Such analyses defy claims that disinterest is simply disguised self-interest by contending that those “instantaneous” reactions precede rationality and derive from a moral sense outside the will. Smith belongs to this anti-egoist school, but lends greater agency to the thinking subject by expanding the stage of reflection and comparison. One evaluates morality by observing interactions between others and judging them in comparison to how one would have felt, and consequently acted, in a similar situation. Because personal involvement warps moral sentiments and judgment, the ideal stance is that of the impartial spectator, who can estimate the propriety of others’ actions and responses uninfluenced by familial or emotional ties to the participants. To estimate whether one’s own actions accord with the Smithean virtues of prudence, justice, selfcommand, and benevolence, one must assume the viewpoint of that spectator, undergoing a heroic act of self-division that paradoxically liberates trustworthy sympathy. Smithean virtue, then, relies heavily on the two commonly invoked variants of disinterest: freedom from bias and what he calls universal benevolence—the willingness to subordinate one’s “own private interest” to the good of others, whether conceived of as individuals, a society, state, or universe. Somewhat paradoxically, however, disinterest requires sympathy, in Smithean terms the imaginative capacity to feel what others feel, which in turn develops out of experience. Smith is emphatic concerning imaginative limits. We only judge propriety by comparing others’ reactions with our own memories: “Every faculty in one man is the measure by which he judges of the like faculty in another. I judge of your sight by my sight, of your ear by my ear, of your reason by my reason, of your resentment by my resentment, of your love by my love. I neither have, nor can have, any other way of judging about them” (Smith, I.I.29). Accordingly, sympathy, while natural, demands both development and protection. While possible and indeed crucial to virtue, Smithean disinterest remains a rare and besieged quality. Even “the most worthless of mankind” can act with “perfect propriety,” but only an elite group achieve the highest form of virtue by combining a sensibility “which surprises by its exquisite and unexpected delicacy and tenderness” and a rigid self-command superior to “the most ungovernable


passions of human nature” (I.I.5.7 and 6). Moreover, in a civilized society, custom and tradition can pervert understanding, the company of the licentious and the lazy can numb judgment, and “the fascination of greatness” can lure the inattentive into admiring rank and wealth rather than the more difficult to discern wisdom and virtue (VI.II.23). Some simply lack the experience necessary to cultivate disinterest, while others lack the fortitude to respond with self-control to what they have encountered. Accordingly, even the virtuous divide into two groups, dependent upon their response to suffering: From proffering sympathy grow the “soft, the gentle, the amiable virtues, the virtues of candid condescension and indulgent humanity,” whereas enduring suffering inspires “the great, the awful and respectable, the virtues of self-denial, of self-government, of that command of the passions which subjects all the movements of our nature to what our own dignity and honour, and the propriety of our own conduct require” (I.I.40). Women, one suspects, are the imagined companions offering “tender sympathy” and men the ones displaying “the great, the awful and respectable” virtues. Yet despite Smith’s gendered language, his reasoning suggests that suffering, survival, and recollection enable the sensitive individual to ascend from the lesser to the greater state of virtue. Radcliffe’s Gothic novels, with their innocent heroines who transform into mistresses of fortitude and melancholy, can be read as stories of how young women (and some men) transform from the admirably amiable into the impressively grand, from sensitive victims to stoical survivors, from dependents to proprietors. Before being forced from their homes, Radcliffe’s isolated and inexperienced heroines, although trembling with sensibility, have little chance for cultivating virtue through experience. Their journeys teach them the lessons of history, the truths of human nature, and the rarity of their own selflessness. Only through suffering, observation, and—significantly— recollection do they perfect their moral vision and become fully capable of recognizing and pursuing justice, economic and emotional, through individual acts of altruism and sympathy. Radcliffe’s best-known novels reflect the pattern. The Italian’s Ellena and Udolpho’s Emily journey through historical time as well as space, encountering improbably long-lived servants, ancient estates, convents, and fortresses, all of which hold clues to the past and glimpses of what is to come. The heroines actively experience


the evils of past and present, in a wealth-hungry society in which women are easily victimized, and reconcile that knowledge with their own expansive sense of virtue. They defend themselves against the threats, implicit in domestic novels, that now leap out in the unmistakable forms of rapists, robbers and tyrants (often the same man, often a paternal figure); they expand their understanding by communing with the sublime, reading their potential fate in terrifying landscapes and decaying ramparts, and reflecting upon the depravity of humankind, their own thwarted desires, and the possibility of supernatural intervention in human affairs. They gradually “master[] the language of social life,” as Karen Valihora describes the Smithean process, learning to “generate their own reflections on how to live.”16 Radcliffe’s heroines climb Smith’s ladder of sensibility, bypassing their repressed and tear-stricken elders, when they learn to reflect rather than repress. Radcliffe’s novels analyze the threat that memory’s mismanagement poses to disinterest and consequently to moral action by arranging characters almost schematically according to their response to painful experiences or unwelcome knowledge, whether personal or historical. In The Mysteries of Udolpho and The Italian, the starkest divide is between characters who are tender-hearted and those who are self-interested. Those categories align with Smith’s division of human beings into the virtuous and the corrupt. All humans seek admiration, but one group does so through “the study of wisdom and the practice of virtue” and another through the acquisition of “wealth and greatness,” he maintains in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (I.III.29). Radcliffean tyrants and villains are Smithean beings “of proud ambition and ostentatious avidity” who construct their identities through external markers of status (I.III.29). They accordingly remember only that which suits their strategy of the moment and manipulate history to their own purposes, suppressing, denying, and murdering evidence of a contrary reality. They turn vicious (Udolpho’s Montoni, The Italian’s Schedoni) or perilously short-sighted to protect or increase their property or position. Prejudice and self-interest—the respective failings of feudal and capitalist ideologies—block their access to sympathy and understanding of justice, the narrator says repeatedly. Evil characters combine the worst traits of feudal lords and of the caricatured commercial man—men like Montoni and Schedoni


who hold “no principle, when interest, or ambition leads”—as if to negotiate the transition to the capitalist tyrant who dominates the Victorian Gothic (Udolpho, 262). Relentless ambition hardens their hearts to pity and turns them into men who appropriately call their assassinations “business” (The Italian, 266).17 Intriguingly, the less villainous but insensible characters, such as Emily St. Aubert’s aunt, are also relentlessly self-serving, forgetting what is inconvenient or unpalatable. The tender-hearted, however, forget nothing, consider benevolence the “highest luxury,” and consequently belong firmly to Smith’s second category of beings: those “of humble modesty and equitable justice” (Udolpho, 500; Smith, I.III.29). One of the great dilemmas property theorists face is explaining how the instinct for self-preservation becomes tempered in the interest of the community at large. In the eighteenth century, the question was a live one as a burgeoning capitalist economy propagated vast new opportunities for aggrandizement even as powerful families consolidated their wealth into great estates. Yet for heroines of sensibility, the problem is the reverse of that which preoccupied property theorists. Their task is to temper their faith in human nature, recognizing the rarity of an empathy that, like Emily’s, “dissipate[s] at once every obscuring cloud to goodness, that passion or prejudice might have raised in her mind” (279). The same assumption of goodness as blinkered prevails in The Old English Baron, where the baron’s “own good heart hindered him from [seeing] the baseness” of his kinsmen, plotting against his adopted son, and later in Austen, as Jane Bennet struggles to find enough goodness to cover both Darcy and Wickham (27). The instinctively good cannot easily enter into the passions of men like Schedoni—or Wickham. For the heroes and heroines of sensibility who lack ambition and avarice, envisioning the Hobbesian nature of the world around them demands a heroic act of imagination, one that only repeated encounters can activate. Before her imprisonment in the castle of Udolpho, Emily “could scarcely have imagined, that passions so fierce and so vicious, as those which Montoni exhibited, could have been concentrated in one individual” (296). Ellena too has trouble believing the viciousness suggested not only by those she meets but by sites such as Lake Celano, the location of a bloody naval fight in which slaves perished while emperor Claudius looked on in amusement, according to Vivaldi’s rendition. Even after escaping from the convent in


which Vivaldi’s family had imprisoned her and where an abbess had planned her death, Ellena can doubt the dark implications of the story: “We scarcely dare to trust the truth of history, in some of its traits of human nature,” she says (187). Vivaldi too has much to learn. When he comes before the Inquisition, he is astonished most of all that evil is an intellectual choice rather than the unthinking consequence of passion—that a human being, endowed with reason, could “argue himself into the commission of such horrible folly, such inveterate cruelty, as exceeds all the acts of the most irrational and ferocious brute” (229–30). After his initial disbelief at the evil embodied in the workings of the Inquisition, however, Vivaldi is enlightened. As he listens to the sounds of torture and empathizes with the sufferers because of his own dangerous position, he intuits a “new view of human nature”: its potential for calculated evil (230). After this epiphany, the young man becomes an adult through a strange ascent of the mental over the physical, as in Smith’s description of the higher virtues displayed by the sufferer. His strong passions, now under his control, become the virtues of courage and fortitude: “His soul became stern and vigorous in despair, and his manner and countenance assumed a calm dignity, which awed, in some degree, even his guards. The pain of his wounds was no longer felt; it appeared as if the strength of his intellectual self had subdued the infirmities of the body, and, perhaps, in these moments of elevation, he could have endured the torture without shrinking” (230). Recognizing evil not only provides the innocent with the knowledge needed for self-protection, but the intellectual property required for the sublime ascent over self. Heroines must learn to anticipate and survive evil despite lacking the faculty for avarice and corruption, which Radcliffe in Udolpho describes as a sympathetic intelligence: That intelligence “which may be said to exist between bad minds, and which teaches one man to judge what another will do in the same circumstances” (273). As in Smith, sympathy implies not pity so much as the fellow-feeling created when one can imagine one’s self in another’s position. Accordingly, in Udolpho, the tyrant Montoni can foresee another man’s plot to defraud him of Emily’s estate after marriage and scheme accordingly to protect himself. Sympathetic evil at times replaces intelligence or insight. In The Italian, Vivaldi’s mother understands how to artfully modulate her desires to Schedoni’s because of the “baseness of her


own heart,” not any “depth of reflexion or keenness of penetration, which enabled her to understand the nature of his” (42). As driven by ambition as she, Schedoni in turn manipulates her desire to secure the dignity of her house by proposing murder. In Radcliffe the saving grace—the element that allows the virtuous some hope for survival—is that the insensible also cannot see perfectly through the darkened mirror separating good and evil and consequently cannot acquire real understanding. The wicked abbess at Ellena’s convent finds the noble features in the nun Olivia’s face “as unintelligible as would have been an Arabic inscription” (103). Although Schedoni can recognize Vivaldi’s passionate nature, because he is “accustomed to impute an evil motive to all conduct,” he cannot perceive his essential goodness or Ellena’s (390). A mind like Schedoni’s substitutes words for truth, the narrator tells us, “not only confounding the limits of neighbouring qualities, but mistaking their very principles” (334). Consequently, Schedoni confuses “delicacy of feeling with fatuity of mind, taste with caprice, and imagination with error,” misjudging his benevolent enemies (334). Both the sensible and the insensible are blind and at times self-deluded, but the blindness of the callous is irredeemable. They cannot learn or perceive virtue because, driven by self-interest, they cannot act as impartial spectators of their own or others’ actions. Emily St. Aubert is the quintessential Heroine of Disinterest, a woman who credibly claims to “have no ambition whatsoever” (220). She initially rejects any suggestion of economic motivation— even the desire to protect her rights from usurpation. As the aunt who will bequeath her property to Emily lies dying and imprisoned by her husband, she implies that her niece will need to guard her inheritance so that she can marry as she wishes. Emily responds in horror even before her aunt completes her thought: “O, madam! interrupted Emily … do not let my mind be stained with a wish so shockingly self-interested” (308). Because of Emily’s limited experience and forceful refusal to “glance on” her financial concerns, it takes her an alarmingly long time to recognize Montoni’s motives. In one long scene after her aunt’s death, the narrator carefully follows her tortured reasoning as she attempts to account for his behavior in some manner other than the obvious: “Why he should wish to detain her, she could scarcely dare to conjecture; but it was too certain that he did so, and the absolute refusal he had formerly given


to her departure allowed her little hope, that he would now consent to it” (379). After much thought, she begins to glean the truth when she “recollected” a fact that would have been uppermost in anyone else’s mind: “that the estates, which had occasioned so much contention, were now hers” (379). Whereas in the earlier scene, Emily refuses like Evelina to allow economic concerns to enter her mind, by now she can recognize that which was self-evident to her callous aunt: that “Montoni was about to employ some stratagem for obtaining [her estates], and that he would detain her his prisoner, till he succeeded” (379). She cannot judge a man like Montoni from a corresponding capacity in herself, but she can imaginatively reconstruct his motives, after much observation and suffering. In tracing her heroines’ experiential educations, Radcliffe painstakingly establishes the necessity of recognizing, although not always acting upon, one’s self-interest. Disinterest, initially the consequence of sensibility and innocence, becomes an undoubted act of agency for her heroes and heroines. Like Vivaldi’s, Ellena’s maturation is reflected in her new ability to recognize and consequently protect herself from evil. When even Schedoni trusts the guide leading them toward Naples, she correctly reads signs of the man’s murderous intent in his reluctance to load a weapon for their defense. As important, she learns to adjust her pleas to suit her presumed father’s disposition and proportion her arguments to the understanding of his self-serving mind. When she first asks to return to her convent in Naples she pleads her desire for soothing rest and security. Recognizing the lack of compassion in Schedoni’s expression, she puts forth another rationale—that the favored convent will serve his desire for secrecy just as well as one elsewhere. The narrator assures us that “had she been more artful, or less disdainful of cunning,” Ellena would have made this argument first, but the underlying implication is that she has indeed learned the necessity of artfulness and the variations among human capacities (332). There is a middle ground, Radcliffe suggests, between self-sacrificing innocence and debasing cunning. While villainous characters lack the imaginative capacity for sympathetic engagement and consequently for morality, sensitive characters also fail if they falter and retreat after alarming and painful experiences, resorting to repression or superstition rather than reflection. There is a third category of beings, consequently, morally


between the tyrants who suppress history and the tender-hearted who busily gather memories. That category comprises men like Emily’s two father figures, St. Aubert and the Count de Villefort, who actively reject rather than engage with the past. Repression suggests a fatal lack of disinterest—an incapacity to rise above momentary grief to achieve the position of the spectator. These men’s repression also ensures that they will fail as pedagogues, in the model of St. Aubert, for only those who actively manage their memories can acquire and transfer real knowledge. As he is dying, St. Aubert advises his daughter to restrain her emotions. Critics generally have taken St. Aubert’s attitude toward sensibility as the novelist’s and his deathbed admonition as a clear if predictable directive.18 In fact, another convention drives Emily’s plot. St. Aubert is an eighteenth-century stereotype, the bitter man who retreats to an isolated estate to nurse the wounds of political infighting and, as in novels spanning from The Female Quixote to Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy, raise a daughter in splendid and dangerous seclusion. He is found in the sentimental novel but he is notably appropriate to the Gothic, one of those “withdrawn, misanthropic Gothic fathers who, distrustful of the world, seeks to protect their daughters through their isolated education.”19 Disabused of his initial “flattering portrait of mankind” by family politics and by fashionable life, apparently in Paris (“the gay and busy scenes of the world”), St. Aubert retreats with a wife chosen for love to cherish domestic values in the pastoral simplicity of La Vallee (1). He withdraws from the society and conversation that Smith considered crucial to restoring a disturbed mind. Men “of retirement and speculation, who are apt to sit brooding at home over either grief or resentment,” lack equality of temper, Smith argued (I.I.39). Antisociability disables such men from the highest form of virtue, which includes the compassionate ability to sooth others in need. Crucially, St. Aubert fails to inform Emily of the ways in which passion, property, and gender intersect in her world and in her family, the knowledge he gained from his own early experiences. This is the legacy of which she is most in need and, because of his own feminized relation to property as a younger son, that he is most capable of providing. A victim of the patrilineal ethos as well as his own temperament, St. Aubert loses his sister to a murderous husband, his family estate to an avaricious brother-in-law, and his remaining


wealth to a trusted companion’s default. He handles memories as ineffectively (and with the same misguided good intentions) as he handles money: He is singularly reluctant to share the disillusioning facts he has learned—his recollections—the horror of which renders him passive. In an early scene, he acts in a typical fashion, sighing and dropping a tear in memory of his wife. His mood made melancholy by the twilight landscape, he shares his thoughts: “I have always fancied, that I thought with more clearness, and precision, at such an hour than at any other, and that heart must be insensible in a great degree, that does not soften to its influence. But many such there are.” … “Are there, indeed, many such?” his daughter asks. Oddly, St. Aubert withholds a direct statement of the obvious: “‘A few years hence, my Emily,’ replied St. Aubert, ‘and you may smile at the recollection of that question—if you do not weep to it’” (46). After this evasion, he insists they continue on their travels, a customarily inconclusive end to their conversations about family history or the follies of humanity, and a symbolic representation of his retreat from memory: leaving behind the estate, he takes his child farther into the mountains and forests. Although often taken as a pattern of male virtue in the novel, then, St. Aubert is in the tradition of revered but inadequate fathers who endanger their daughters because of their own disengagement from the world and blinkered fixation on their child (not inconsequentially, they always lack male heirs on whom to concentrate). When St. Aubert urges Emily to restrain her sensibility, what he is suggesting is not admirable self-regulation but repression, and what he is offering is not education but overprotection oddly accompanied by negligence. After St. Aubert’s death, Emily must complete her education, learning to recognize the power of ambition over human minds and to negotiate her role as heiress in a world of dynastic marriages. Emily comes to understand that she and the world of La Vallee are exceptions and her father’s lessons only an imperfect introduction to what she must learn through experience and recollection, not bitterness and repression. In recovering the history he suppressed, Emily discreetly acknowledges the failings of the paternal pedagogue whose benign neglect endangered her financially, emotionally, and physically. Emily’s second father figure, Count de Villefort, is another paternal miseducator—his failure represented most emphatically by his taking


the wrong side on the debate over her suitors. He draws on his own disappointing experience in urging Emily to abandon Valancourt for Monsieur Du Pont. In a peculiar scene, he claims that Emily will overcome her “romantic tenderness” if only she stops cherishing memories in solitude (565). He bases his authority on the fact that he too has suffered from a lost love, claiming, even as his eyes fill with tears, that he can recall those earlier days “without emotion.” Emily replies: “What mean those tears?—they speak, I fear, another language—they plead for me!” (565). His tears undermine his claim that repression breeds fortitude. Emily, more experienced at this point, recognizes that memory itself provides strength to sensible minds. As in her scene with Montoni, she insists on the inalienability of her affections and her right to judge. In rejecting the instruction of this benevolent father figure, she signals her release not only from insidious evil but also from the pedagogical imperative built into the logic of the affective economy. Crucially, Emily’s lover Valancourt, like her father, is a man of sensibility who retreats from his intense feelings into denial and repression. Unlike the disinterested Emily, Valancourt takes pleasure in ostentation, succumbing to “the gaiety of the most splendid court in Europe, the magnificence of the palaces, entertainments, and equipages, that surrounded him” (295). His real folly, however, is not his gambling or womanizing but his mishandling of loss and memory. As Valancourt grows increasingly aware of his moral decline, he attempts to repress recollections of happier times. Those memories become stones in the living stream of life, painful reminders of his inability to protect Emily and resist vice. Creative recollection, memory theorists say, provides comfort by reshaping the past to accord with preferred notions of the self. Valancourt’s memories, however, are ghostly visitants. Emily’s image lives on but in altered form: It “was no longer the friend, the monitor, that saved him from himself, and to which he retired to weep the sweet, yet melancholy, tears of tenderness. When he had recourse to it, it assumed a countenance of mild reproach, that wrung his soul, and called forth tears of unmixed misery; his only escape from which was to forget the object of it, and he endeavoured, therefore, to think of Emily as seldom as he could” (295). Like St. Aubert, Valancourt suppresses what he cannot reconcile with his knowledge of self and with his faith in humanity, but the repressed returns in uncanny shapes to haunt him. Notably,


Valancourt is reunited with Emily only after he comes to recall her memory not as a “reproach, that wrung his soul” but as a talisman. He vows that his recollections of her grief will be his future protection from wrongdoing (295). In both Udolpho and The Italian, the heroines scrutinize and interpret castles, mountains, precipices, and fortresses—and from them learn truths they are not yet capable of confronting directly. Shuddering at precipices as she travels, Emily St. Aubert confronts her own danger and the prospect that God’s benevolence may not keep her from plunging; prying into inaccessible mountain regions she recognizes that she is surrounded by the unfathomable. When she first glimpses Udolpho, she does not yet know her new uncle intends to poison her aunt and imprison her, yet she reads her future in the ancient structure: When examining the castle’s “lofty walls, overtopt with briny, moss and nightshade, and the embattled towers that rose above—long-suffering and murder came to her thoughts” (228). The narrator slyly invites us to dismiss her response as superstition, describing her “horror” as “one of those instantaneous and unaccountable convictions, which sometimes conquer even strong minds” (228). Her horror, of course, is justified—Radcliffe is demanding that the reader, like the heroine, learn to judge for herself. Later, when tormented by the “train of anticipated evils, which she could neither conquer, nor avoid,” Emily gazes outside her window. Nature in childhood taught her to revere God; landscape in adulthood gradually teaches her to fear the evil in human nature (241). Accordingly, after confronting Montoni about his mysterious machinations, she for the first time ascends the castle’s ramparts and, by gazing at the prospect, attempts to envision what passes in “that [man’s] mind” (243). Surveying her vast prison provides the heroine with a visual puzzle to interpret, a way to represent her own situation to herself. Emily begins to grasp the relativity of experience in the various viewpoints that allow the same landscape to appear in different guises. The castle’s watch towers, battlements, and turrets suggest that her victimization is only the latest in hundreds of years of such events. The castle places her in history, figuring forth her imprisonment in a feudalist property plot, in which she is in danger of becoming yet another regretfully dead “lady of the castle” (248). As Emily moves, seemingly endlessly, between castles, convents, and villas, she returns repeatedly in her mind to these landmarks of


what she has learned and has yet to understand. While many critics have suggested that Emily’s story extends unnecessarily beyond Udolpho to Villefort’s Chateau-le-Blanc, the extension is important to the narrative of self-development. At the chateau, she deploys the lessons she has learned from Udolpho, including her faith in her own judgment, gradually replacing her horror with understanding. Her tender recollections guide her as she rejects an eager suitor and comes to understand the failings of Valancourt, who also has encountered suffering but, unlike her, succumbed to the vices of Paris. In The Italian, Ellena also travels through thousand-year-old forests and across terrifying precipices. On the way, she reads landscape and interprets the nature of the buildings that she will enter—the property that seems to be determining her fate. After her kidnapping, the monastery she approaches appears to be “menacing the unhappy Ellena with hints of future suffering” (77). The seaside hideout to which she is next taken is decaying, its gates swinging forlornly, and she knows her murder is planned. The landscape too is oddly active: Mountains stand like a “ruffian” (185) and landscapes “character themselves” sublime (189); cliffs “breast the eternal fury” of the ocean and suggest to Ellena that she is going into perpetual banishment (242). Yet the sublime landscape also takes her outside herself. The lofty mountains and gloomy grandeur surrounding a post-house renew her courage briefly. She concludes that she can endure with more fortitude here than among the “tamer landscapes of nature” because the “objects seen [sic] to impart some of their own force, their own sublimity to the soul” (75). Landscapes offer consolation and strength, oddly, by forcing themselves into the heroine’s consciousness. Like Emily, Ellena revives amid sublimity even as she comes to doubt the reality of golden visions of the happy past, the memories of bliss that in retrospect seem sprung from the genre of romance, not reality. The memories gained through experience become associated with certain objects, people, structures, and landscapes, which in turn give tangible form to the lesson. The castle and the villa, the bay of Naples and the sounding cataract, become internalized as the heroine’s intellectual property. A mountain suggests God’s awesome power; a castle the godless ambitions of tyrants; a family dog the mundane realities defying superstition; a piece of music the bond between people of sensibility; a winding river the innocence of


childhood; a miniature the price the innocent can pay for evil ambitions. Knowledge inheres in landscape and architecture and can be gained privately, through the interaction of the thinking mind with natural and created forms. The tendency to conflate objects, people, and memories finds comic expression in the servant Paulo, who in the last chapters of The Italian refuses to lose sight of the roof of the building in which he believes his master to be held. He alternates between exclaiming over the structure and over Vivaldi, as if the two were interchangeable, and as if his sighting set the man free: “‘It is the roof, it is the very roof!’ exclaimed Paulo, vaulting from the ground, and clapping his hands; ‘it is the very roof, the roof! O my master, my master! The roof, the roof!’ He continued alternately to exclaim, ‘My master, the roof! My master! The roof!’” (447). In typical deflating fashion, Radcliffe takes care to inform us that the roof’s significance was entirely illusory. Vivaldi admits to Paulo that, because trapped in a windowless dungeon, he cannot confirm where precisely he was held captive. While provided as a form of comic relief, this scene reveals a key element in Radcliffe’s Gothic world, for it reads property as people, rather than people as property. When initially confronted with evil, the innocent and the ignorant become superstitious. Superstition, like human character, comes in two primary forms: The fear of supernatural agents, which I will discuss below, is the most apparent. The other superstition is the “visionary prejudice” of families like the Vivaldis, who endow the estate with agency (34). As Wollstonecraft suggests in the Vindication, it is this ghostly animation of property that corrupts society. Those who imagine the estate as a being—like Otranto—capable of enforcing the providential law of inheritance are likely to accord the illusory House more significance than the people within and consequently sacrifice girls and younger sons to maintain that entirely imaginary entity. Accordingly, in The Italian, Vivaldi’s father tells his son “you belong to your family, not your family to you,” while his violently passionate wife, we are told, “loved her son, rather as being the last of two illustrious houses, who was to re-unite and support the honour of both, than with the fondness of a mother” (12). The hero’s attempt to marry a girl of little social value inspires his parents to arrange a series of kidnappings, imprisonments, and murders to protect their vision of the estate as an immortal force. While in


Otranto the castle revives to restore the heir, in Radcliffe people rather than property victimize the rising generation on behalf of an estate animated by their superstitious minds. The dreaded ghosts turn out to be assassins hired by relatives, an explanation far more alarming than the rattling armor of the long-dead Alfonso. The other form of superstition, fear of the supernatural, is the consequence of inexperience or ignorance, the explanation of last resort for a mind not yet capable of grasping the truth of human nature and contemporary society—that ambition and greed powerfully motivate most of the human race and turn the myth of male protection into a tool for exploitation. Because beset by terrors she cannot yet name, Emily’s fears take ghostly shape in the castle of Udolpho. She listens in melancholy to “the hollow sighings of the wind along the corridor and round the castle,” and observes the dying fire and the lamp on the bedside (240). The “gloomy light, instead of dispelling her fear, assisted it; for, by its uncertain rays, she almost fancied she saw shapes flit past her curtains and glide into the remote obscurity of her chamber” (241). Similarly, after Emily lifts the black veil and glimpses what (we find out later) she believes to be a moldering body but that (we find out later) is a waxwork, horror freezes her in an unmoving, unlivable present, excluding “for a time, all sense of past, and dread of future misfortune” (249). In the tradition of her father, she vows silence on such terrors and temporarily descends into insanity: “Thus compelled to bear within her own mind the whole horror of the secret, that oppressed it, her reason seemed to totter under the intolerable weight,” we are told (350). She fixes a “wild and vacant look” on the servant Annette, responds to nothing, and descends into “long fits of abstraction,” sighing but not crying (350). When Annette in desperation calls Montoni to the scene, Emily seems only able to sense that he represents a form of evil to be avoided. Hearing his voice, “a gleam of recollection seemed to shoot athwart her mind, for she immediately rose from her seat, and moved slowly to a remote part of the room”; yet even while retreating, she inexplicably responds “yes” to all he says (350). Her mind, we are told, “seemed to retain no other impression, than that of fear,” and she must be reminded that the man who visits is “the Signor” (351). Madness is the effort to repel the awareness of the far-reaching power of “the Signor.” In Clery’s words, the forms shaped by the heroine’s imagination “are the imprint of the


arbitrary excesses of patriarchy,” the “bugbears of capitalism” whose ethos the heroine cannot yet comprehend.20 Significantly, in the Gothic novel, it is the long-lived servants and peasants who recall what the aristocrats have forgotten or denied. As in Blackstone’s description of investiture, the observers’ “private knowledge,” oddly resistant to eradication, secures justice, bringing the community into the castle and feudal property relations into the anachronistically bourgeois world view of the novel. In Otranto, the priest Jerome confirms the castle’s ancient dispossession; in fact, he is the father of the foundling heir, the parent of the hero as well as the tool for his restoration. In Udolpho, the servant Annette sneaks into the heroine’s room at midnight to tell the history of Signora Laurentini, the woman whose murder led to the illicit ownership of the castle, while the housekeeper Dorothee reveals the story of the late Marchioness of another estate. In Clara Reeve’s novel, the hero Edmund seeks to uncover the secrets of his adopted father’s manor by sleeping in a haunted room, but it is the serving man Joseph who knows he is the true heir: “I will come here again to-morrow night, when all the family are a-bed; and I will tell you some things that you never yet heard,” he offers in a scene repeated in countless Gothic novels, surviving at least until Emily Brontë’s Nelly Dean.21 Notably, in The Old English Baron it is the long-remembering Joseph who also can physically and symbolically “deliver [the castle] into the possession of the new proprietor” because he has remained a constant inhabitant (20). He is, as Blackstone imagined, the witness whose private knowledge secures proprietorship. In The Italian as well, peasants and servants reveal hidden histories. A surly guide artfully recalls the priest Schedoni’s murderous past as if unaware of his involvement; a young servant tells the hero’s father of his son’s imprisonment; an “ancient domestic” confirms Schedoni’s identity to the Inquisition; and a family physician and the servant Beatrice confirm the nun Olivia’s story of faking death to escape her murderous husband (420). For social functioning, these novels suggest, modern and premodern forms of memory—the personal and the testimonial—must be reconciled. It is significant, accordingly, that superstition first gets the better of Emily St. Aubert after Annette fills her in on the history of the castle and of Montoni, a story that as it turns out is also Emily’s family history. Annette describes the illicit conspiracy of Emily’s


ancestor Signora Laurentini and of Montoni to gain control of the castle, offering the first piece of the puzzle of Emily’s entrapment. As Annette recites a history of proprietorship redirected by cunning and greed, both women hear a low knocking on the wall. They stiffen in horror. Yet the moment is deflating: “It came repeatedly. Annette then screamed loudly, and the chamber door slowly opened.—It was Caterina, come to tell Annette, that her lady wanted her” (239). Although the ghost turns out to be a servant, Emily at this moment is closer to recognizing the horrors facing her and the nature of those who have power over her. In explaining the “strange history of Signora Laurentini,” Annette has given Emily a glimpse of her own potential fate. Emily’s trepidation reflects her fear not of ghosts but of being discovered seeking the knowledge that has been denied her by both her benevolent father and the tyrannical Montoni. Once Emily understands her own family’s history and comprehends her uncle Montoni’s nature, however, she no longer imagines apparitions when she hears mysterious noises at the castle of Udolpho. She “recollects” without paralyzing horror the waxen corpse behind the veil, understands how to interpret her father’s tearful viewing of the secret miniature of the woman who turns out to be her murdered aunt, and comprehends the motivations of the ambitious Montoni. For the first time she senses the contours of her danger: She comprehends fully that she is no domestic heroine obliged to display loyalty to her elders but in fact a Gothic victim, trapped “in the wild and solitary mountains of a foreign country, in the castle, and the power of a man, to whom, only a few preceding months ago, she was an entire stranger; who had already exercised an usurped authority over her, and whose character she now regarded, with a degree of terror, apparently justified by the fears of others” (240). She realizes something about Montoni’s personality as well: He has the “invention equal to the conception and talents to the execution of any project” and is a man of greed with no trace of tenderness: “she greatly feared he had a heart too void of feeling to oppose the perpetration of whatever his interest might suggest” (240). Emily has begun to arrange experience into the knowledge she needs to survive, without fear of disappointing her father or her suitor. Meaningful education in Radcliffe requires overcoming the lectures of the elders as well as their imposed ignorance. Her novels accordingly mark the end of the eighteenth-century thematic of the


“proper education.” In The Italian, the heroine’s upbringing goes almost entirely unnoted, dispensing with a convention prominent in novels including The Mysteries of Udolpho as well as The Female Quixote, Evelina, A Simple Story, Emmeline, and many others, in which the heroines’ pedagogical acquisitions are well-detailed and accorded primacy in the plot. Although Ellena has things to learn, no benevolent elder instructs her, other than an unremarkable aunt whose only decisions are timid miscalculations. Both domestic and Gothic novels concern themselves deeply with the dynamics of pedagogy, but the Gothic novel uncovers a reality veiled in the domestic novel: that post-Lockean educational methods were a particularly insidious form of control.22 As Locke and Rousseau both recognized, the most powerful education is so thoroughly internalized that the pupil eventually can act without direct instruction. The implication, of course, is that the student will act according to the dictates of the tutor, producing the fruits of that educational labor. In the Gothic, the paradigm creates victims rather than pupils: “A child ought to have no ears or eyes but as a parent directs,” the doomed Matilda tells her maid in Otranto, her blind obedience previewing her death at her father’s hands (41). Radcliffe forcefully displays the disproportion inherent in the Lockean method, overthrowing a key convention of the domestic novel. In earlier works, daughters’ educational receptivity is a crucial filial offering, a sign of virtue that animates the affective economy. Children, dependents, and pupils who defy their beloved elders risk the withdrawal of love as well as financial support. In novels such as Clarissa, affective withdrawals strike the heart more forcefully than any material loss and ultimately efface it. (Clarissa repeatedly insists she cares nothing about her grandfather’s inheritance other than as a sign of his love). Material and emotional rewards are usually denied in tandem—love and money intertwine—but it is only the emotional neglect that earlier heroines can mourn with propriety. Freedom from pedagogical control consequently requires a loosening of the affective ties and the obligations of gratitude: the death of the affective economy. Radcliffe frees her heroines from their tutelary deities and reveals education as a form of blackmail when based on affective relations. It is no accident that Radcliffe combined the father figure with the murderous tyrant in the figures of Schedoni, Montoni, and A Sicilian


Romance’s Mazzini. Indeed, Radcliffe creates father figures so evil and daughters so pious that filial piety appears ludicrous. When the newly orphaned Emily refuses to marry the hero Valancourt without the approval of her uncaring aunt, her overdeveloped sense of obligation places her in the hands of the woman’s tyrannical husband and threatens her life, liberty, and estate. The Italian, written three years after Udolpho, goes a giant step further, all but parodying its sentimental predecessors. The heroine, Ellena, must lose rather than gain a father in order to marry her lover. Her mistaken impulse to filial piety, in fact, puts her in the hands of an assassin. Ellena believes for a long stretch that the murderous Schedoni is her father, learning only at the end that he is her uncle, the assassin of her father, and her attempted murderer. During that period of misunderstanding, she falls into a style of thinking reminiscent of an Evelina or a Matilda, imagining herself in a relation in which the father figure will offer protection in return for her displays of devotion—only to have the plot display how extraordinarily vulnerable such behavior makes her. “‘Reproach you!—Reproach my father!’ … ‘Why should I reproach my father?’” Ellena asks Schedoni tenderly, speaking in “the most soothing accents of compassion” as he kicks out of sight the dagger with which he planned to murder her (274). (Appropriately, her tender looks feel to him like daggers). Although the emotions she felt upon first seeing him were “so opposite to those of filial tenderness” that she recognizes she can never love and revere him, she vows “to repay him in gratitude, what was withheld in affection” (349). Given that Schedoni is the novel’s most villainous character and in fact her real father’s murderer, her persistent misreading stands as a dizzying interrogation of the obligations of daughterly love. By the end of the novel, Ellena’s filial piety can only be reviewed with horror and her misgivings about marrying Vivaldi as an antiquated self-sacrifice. In The Italian, romantic love is sacralized, but filial love is a relative virtue, dependent upon the worth of the elder.23 Similarly, in Udolpho, the heroine’s initial obedience to conventions of femininity, manipulated by men like Montoni and Schedoni, propels the plot. For Emily as well as Ellena, conduct book teachings about female failings prove to be among the most dangerous mistruths the heroine must reject—mind-forged manacles that incapacitate the otherwise rational and shrewd protagonist. Although


paternal figures offer up conventional wisdom as irrefutable truth, they deploy it primarily to manipulate the heroines. Typically, villains gender their actions in order to devalue affectivity, casting self-interest as a masculine virtue, tenderness a female failing. In Radcliffe, such obsessive policing of gender lines always signals depravity, whether pursued by men or women. In a crucial scene in Udolpho, for example, Montoni attempts to entrap Emily by playing on her fears of displaying girlish weakness, claiming that asserting her claim to her estate would be to betray the “contemptible foibles, that frequently mark the female character,” including an inferior understanding as well as the “avarice and the love of power, which latter makes women delight to contradict and to tease, when they cannot conquer” (380). He deploys a Rousseauean version of women as inherently weak and consequently cunning to deflect the obvious fact that it is he, not she, who is avaricious. Intriguingly, Montoni concludes his attack by accusing Emily of participating in the wrong genre, forcing the two into a meta-commentary on the theatricality of the proceedings: “‘You speak like a heroine,’ said Montoni, contemptuously; ‘we shall see whether you can suffer like one’” (381). He implies that she has, like Arabella or Austen’s Catherine Morland, misplaced her genre. Her stirring assertions can only be comic in the realist world he insists they inhabit. Yet Emily no longer believes herself to be the misguided heroine of a domestic novel, overwrought by foolish female fear. Autodidact and detective, she has educated herself on what Blackstone called the power of absolute dominion over the soul and on the heiress’ strategic and therefore dangerous position. Her strength is born out of her new and unwavering trust in self, her sense of conscious worth, and her awareness of moral superiority. She finally becomes “her own mistress,” who knows “what she owes to her self” (624). She has become Smith’s ideal, displaying the self-government that creates propriety and dignity. When Radcliffe explains away the supernatural sounds to reader and heroine alike, she is not retreating from the decadent pleasures of Gothic excess. She is announcing that the decidedly real dangers to women do not come from the other world but from the laws of property and human nature. For readers as well as the heroines, however, that truth is not self-evident: The narrator, famously, withholds crucial information, thereby forcing the alarmed reader to join in the Gothic victim’s educational journey, imaginatively


suffering from disempowerment and ignorance as the authoritative and selective narrator tantalizes and taunts. In classic Gothic style, her novels are a form of “remedial education … forcing or commanding [the readers’] emotions to educate” them, and Radcliffe’s strategic manipulations are key to that emotional manipulation.24 Like the protagonists, the reader does not know who was playing the lute outside Emily’s window, or much about Ellena’s parents. In fact, the reader is given even less information than the heroines, initially not told even what Emily believes she saw behind the veil or, in The Italian, what information Ellena has been told or discovered about her family history. Radcliffe’s narrative refusals tempt readers to indulge in superstition, like Emily as she wanders the lonely corridors of Udolpho, apprehensive of “she scarcely knew what” (308). But they also offer the vicarious opportunity for the reader, like Smith’s spectator, to learn virtue, improving judgment through suffering and reflection. Her strategies, then, interpellate the reader to offer a critique of genre, suggesting that we can climb from the lesser virtues inculcated by the domestic novel to the “great, the awful, and respectable” virtues only by abandoning tame realist fiction, vicariously reliving the psychology of ignorance through reading the Gothic. As part of their educational project, Radcliffe’s novels invite readers to inhabit the fine line between tutelage and tyranny, in Alan Richardson’s phrase.25 To most critics, the aristocratic marriages that conclude these novels are the author’s easy way out. Emily triumphs over horror and acquires control over nearly every castle or home she has entered; Ellena marries the aristocrat Vivaldi. With these plot twists, Mary Poovey argues, Radcliffe simply eliminates the heroine’s “painful circumstances” rather than imagining a larger cultural transformation.26 While crediting Gothic authors, including Radcliffe, with expanding the terms in which female experience can be narrated, George Haggerty laments the tendency of such works “to marry off their heroines to the highest bidder.”27 Similarly, Rictor Norton notes that property looms larger than love in Radcliffe’s fiction.28 Yet paradoxically, I argue, the heroines’ concluding elevations signify their ultimate economic and emotional independence. Radcliffean heroes and heroines act upon the presumptions of the modern contractual self. Acting upon their right to behave according to the dictates of their “sacred” and “affecting recollections,” Radcliffe’s heroines also


presume self-ownership, their right to sell their labor or their estates, marry freely, and engage in voluntary exchanges on terms of equality, not as subjugated dependents (Italian, 177, 178).29 Their property rights are earned through intellectual labor—the consequence of self-possession. When Emily and Valancourt reunite at novel’s end, her estates enable their marriage financially, but their joint educations provide them with the invaluable internalized understanding of the relations between people and possessions, power and propriety. Invigorated with this knowledge, the heroine and her hero can return to their Edenic world, but unlike St. Aubert or Villefort, they do so knowingly rather than in ignorance or bitterness. They retreat enriched with recollections, which have taught them about themselves and others and given them a valuable if intangible intellectual property to pass on to their children. Emily St. Aubert’s memories imbue her ancestral home with new meaning, signifying the property’s value as the reward of the heroine’s intellectual and psychological labor, a property half-perceived and half-created. Modern property theorists construe property not as a tangible good—a piece of land—but as a list of entitlements and duties. Theorist A. M. Honoré’s list of such rights are usually taken as definitive: the owner has a permanent right to possess and manage the property and its proceeds; the right to security against it being taken; and the right to bequeath or gift the property. The owner also has a duty to refrain from using the property in a way that hurts others. Notably, in the remarkable series of property transactions that conclude Udolpho, Emily buys, sells, manages, and bequeaths as if ticking off the list. The transactions give the trembling heroine the air of the self-made man, not an indebted wife. She gives Udolpho to a worthy couple distantly related (and abused) by Montoni; sells her aunt’s Toulouse property so that she can re-purchases her father’s childhood estate; provides her loyal servant Annette with a marriage settlement in the form of the management of that new purchase; and settles with her own new husband at La Vallee. She fulfills her primary duty as a proprietor, ensuring that no one is impoverished by that proprietorship, and asserts her ownership by the act of alienation, the ultimate demonstration of modern property rights. She is both capitalist and paternalist, in the idealized sense of the concept. When she asks Valancourt’s permission to sell one of her


many homes, accordingly, “he feels the full value of the compliment” (672). Even if property laws recognize him as the proprietor of his wife’s property, he knows it is Emily who possesses, but cannot be possessed. The Italian’s Ellena gains wealth upon marriage but inherits nothing. The novel concludes with the heroine and her hero creating a marital home in a land of romance, a villa overlooking the bay of Naples and surrounded by pleasure grounds, its air filled with “all Arabia’s perfumes” (476). Rather than Ellena’s dowry or the reward for filial piety, the estate seems sprung from the active imaginations of the long-suffering couple. Rather than earning a paternal bequest through displays of devotion and disinterest, Ellena has learned to glory in the “virtuous independence” she demonstrated in supporting herself by selling her embroidery and artwork (13). Notably, unlike protagonists such as Evelina, she never believes her poverty incapacitates her to marry an aristocrat, and her industriousness is directly credited with increasing her sense of self-possession. Like Blackstone in his description of feudalism, these novels depict traditional family relations as a form of perpetual indebtedness, an obstacle to the dream of absolute dominion that, in the eighteenth century, came to be considered as a form of liberty. In his history of property law, Blackstone presumes a historical progression from conditional to absolute dominion, claiming the latter as “the most free and independent species” of possession, differing from its predecessor in the length but not the nature of the exchange. The oath of fealty places a lord and vassal in an interlocking structure of obligations and loyalties, with possession conditional upon continued fealty—an affective economy, implying word, deed, and feeling. The Radcliffean Gothic, like the mid-century theorist, rejects the “burdensome tenures” of the affective economy, instead telling stories that reveal its perils. Fittingly, although Emily falls to her father’s knees in the fashion of a sentimental heroine, Radcliffe frees her next heroine from these vestiges of the inheritance plot. Appropriately, the Evelina-style scene in which the daughter, indifferent to offers of wealth, vows lifelong affection and gratitude to a paternal figure is transferred to a servant, Paulo. When offered a thousand sequins and independence for helping rescue the hero from the Inquisition, Paulo, like Evelina after her first encounter with her father, is strangely ungrateful for


the offer. What he wants is not release from his feudal position but a continued affective relationship with his master. The offer is converted to a higher position within the household as well as the treasure, and he can consequently serve as comic relief at the wedding festival, shouting O! giorno felice! from the treetops. The relocation of the conventional display of devotion from child to servant suggests that the daughterly abjection before the father figure no longer held ideological weight. The heroine, consequently, can rise from her knees and take her role as property owner. The emotional freedom eventually earned by these late-century heroines explains why at times the mid-century domestic novel seems more Gothic than the 1790s works that represent its effulgence. Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–8) outdoes Udolpho in its dark inevitability, the sense of “overdetermined forces spawning inexorable consequences,” because the heroine is caught in an ideological shift.30 While Clarissa returns to her “father’s home” in death, Radcliffe’s Emily St. Aubert does so in life, her father’s failures as a parent and a landowner rectified. Radcliffe’s Gothic fantastically renders the realities of women’s legal standing in the eighteenth century, yet her novels create an escape route unimaginable at the time of Clarissa.

5 Property Recollected in Tranquility

Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin both recognized the superior power of fiction over abstraction in delineating “things passing in the moral world.”1 Accordingly, they turned to fiction to reach readers whom philosophy would not sway or sentimental stories had blinded. Wollstonecraft followed her Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) with Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman (1798) to bring life to “the misery and oppression, peculiar to women, that arise out of the partial laws and customs of society,” while Godwin sought to reveal “domestic and unrecorded despotism” in Caleb Williams (1794), published a year after his philosophical treatise, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice.2 During this period, they and the radical writers in their circle engage in a double-barreled critique, both of an unjust society and the narrative conventions that sustain it, their tragic sagas countering Burkean tales of chivalry’s operations and romantic fantasies of love’s triumph. They harness narrative to critique narrative, their attacks ferocious because, in their philosophies, ideological seductions threaten the independent, rational judgment that substantiates individual identity and creates a just society. Rejecting inherited traditions and wealth as corrupting, they also reject the concept of identity as a birthright. They draw instead on contractual discourse and the ideal of Romantic memory to construe selfhood as the product of experience and education, crafted into a coherent whole through recollection.3 The heroes and heroines of their works, accordingly, consider themselves as “independent minds,” in visionary moments believing themselves capable of overcoming material 116

Property Recollected in Tranquility 117

realities through sheer force of will and mental ingenuity. The protagonists, however, must also confront the paradox of a dematerialized identity. The remembered self is crafted through narrative and, accordingly, under constant threat, either because incommunicable or untenable in retrospect. If one writes one’s self into being by recalling the events in one’s life, one can also un-write that identity if new information destabilizes those memories or recasts the implications of earlier actions. Critics have surveyed the way Godwin and Wollstonecraft simultaneously exploit and expose the politics of language, deploying parallel, inset, and doubled narratives while portraying minor and major characters as mentally entrapped within familiar stories naturalizing inequality and customary prejudices.4 What has not been recovered is the central role the Heroine of Disinterest plays in their critiques, representing the virtue unsustainable in English society and referencing the fictional paradigm that maintained the fantasy of its plausibility. Wollstonecraft, Godwin, and other radical writers systematically explode the tenets of the affective economy in which such heroines operate, depicting education as an ideological imposition and filial piety as a trap. Rather than a reward that triumphantly concludes tales of virtuous sons and daughters, in their fiction as in their philosophies, inheritance is the legal mechanism by which structural inequalities are perpetuated and character destroyed. Disinterest remains an ideal, in Godwin primarily as an epistemological stance and in Wollstonecraft as the capacity for benevolence and the rejection of the single-minded pursuit of wealth and status. Yet what their novels make unmistakably clear is that in a capitalist, misogynist, and status-obsessed society, few individuals retain either the interest in or the capacity for ignoring personal economic interests or even perceiving an alternative system of values; those few who do become victims of the rapacious and the self-seeking people who surround them, as well as of the legal and cultural bulwark that enforces their class or gender inferiority. To dramatize this bleak idea, Wollstonecraft, Godwin, and their radical peers torture and kill the Heroine of Disinterest, the icon of the inheritance novel, exposing the implausibility of such a character’s survival in late eighteenth-century England and, by extension, revealing the role fictional constructions play in occluding painful realities. They uncover the politics of genre, performing


the work Robert Miles considers the essence of Romantic-era fiction: making ideology visible.5 Given these writers’ interest in form, it is fitting that a generically promiscuous work inspired Wollstonecraft’s intervention: Edmund Burke’s hyperbolic blend of fiction and philosophy in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), structured around the iconic scene of Marie Antoinette attacked and unprotected. Burke’s highly fictionalized account of the queen fleeing half-naked to the feet of her king, invoking themes of virtue assaulted and domesticity threatened, was no “unadulterated narration of historical fact, but itself a scene from the pages of gothic-pathetic literature,” as Claudia Johnson observes.6 Wollstonecraft’s Vindication accordingly attacks Burke for misappropriating literary conventions as well as for making illogical claims about the effects of enforced inequality upon social relations. English society has not inherited a noble tradition of chivalry but blindly replicated a legal and ideological system that vitiates generation after generation, she contends in her Vindication, and that tradition has been perpetuated by sentimental fictions aestheticizing and naturalizing female suffering. The emotional relay between the weak and the strong posited by Burkean chivalry violates the logic of human nature, she argues. Inequality inspires tyranny, contempt, cunning, and ignorance—not protectiveness and gratitude. In her unfinished novel Maria, Wollstonecraft again rebukes Burke, but this time fights fiction with fiction, sentiment with sentiment, portraying a woman (not a queen of France named Marie but a wife in England named Maria) imprisoned in a madhouse by a rapacious husband. No swords leap from scabbards to defend Maria, but the fault is not one assertive masculinity could remedy, Wollstonecraft painstakingly establishes. English laws allow husbands to imprison their wives and demand their property. Literary conventions entice women like Maria into participating in their own entrapment, enchanted by fantasies of disinterested benevolence and of romantic love. Because in Wollstonecraft disinterested behavior continues to represent virtue in its most resonant form, the death of this Heroine of Disinterest serves as the sharpest possible indictment of English society. Maria’s idealism limns the workings of goodness in an alternative universe of equality and displays its futility in a hierarchical society reproduced through the transfer of inherited wealth and dependent upon women’s economic and emotional disempowerment.


Like Maria, the protagonists of Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy (1795) and Mary Hays’ Victim of Prejudice (1799) are classic Heroines of Disinterest, as is Emily Melville, a minor but pivotal character in Caleb Williams. The story of Secresy’s Sibella replays the familiar plot of dispossession in all but its tragic ending. The orphan Sibella covets “no castles, no palaces” but a marriage of affection, and she has educated herself into sensibility on her uncle’s isolated estate.7 Her beloved is her cousin, so the elements are available for a convenient union of property and love. Yet the value of Sibella’s beloved, like that of the fickle Darnford in Maria, is a figment of the heroine’s imagination. Moreover, as in Maria, inheritance is the problem, not the resolution. Maria’s small bequest from a relative entices a cruel man into marrying and abusing her. Sibella’s bequest from her father, we discover, inspired her uncle to imprison her on the grounds of his castle, the victim of a Rousseauean social experiment by which he hoped to educate an obedient and (unknown to her) wealthy wife for his illegitimate son. Like Maria, Sibella wills herself to death when faced with the perfidy of her lover, unrevived by the prospect of being an heiress and incapable, like Maria, of escaping the entrapping fantasy of romantic love. Her story, like Maria’s and Emily Melville’s, ends in death. Mary Hays also crafts the heroine of Victim of Prejudice from the legacies of well-known sentimental fiction. Like Evelina, Mary Raymond has been ideally educated by a benevolent foster father, who has taught her the traditional lessons of emotional restraint, rational judgment, and insensitivity to the lure of wealth. He has also passed on to her the diary her mother wrote in prison, before being hanged for murdering her seducer, an educational bequest that in other novels safeguards the heroine from error. (He presumes its pedagogical power to be overwhelming, saying, “I can give you no stronger lesson,” 102). Like Clarissa, Mary refuses an alliance with her rapist, and like Pamela in rejecting Mr. B’s propositions, she spurns his offer as “the cursed price of innocence and principle” while vowing to “seek, by honest labour, the bread of independence” (119). To the Christian morality of Richardson’s heroines, however, Mary adds the revolutionary rhetoric she learned from her foster father. In an unwittingly comic scene early in the novel, she as a child invokes these high ideals in defense of a rabbit. “Have you not taught me, dear father, that in the cause of right we should contemn bodily pain?” she asks after he questions her judgment in defending a hare


from hunters (23). She frees the animal, according it life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness: “Liberty, my father has told me, is the truest and most invaluable good,” she explains, claiming restraint to be as “barbarous” an act as slaughter (24). Mary’s heroic, pointless, and self-sacrificing defense of the animal foreshadows her inability to protect herself, despite her sensibility, devotion, and ideal upbringing. She concludes her tale in prison, like her mother, disavowing the power of education to overcome injustices embedded in mental, legal, and economic codes—and indirectly indicting a literary tradition that led her to imagine she could triumph. She recalls that her benefactor on his deathbed questioned whether “in cultivating my mind, in fostering a virtuous sensibility, in imbuing my heart with principles of justice and rectitude, he had not been betraying my happiness!” (25). The conclusion suggests he had: “While the practice of the world opposes the principles of the sage, education is a fallacious effort, morals an empty theory, and sentiment a delusive dream” (33). Godwin’s Caleb Williams is sympathetic and idealistic, but obviously neither a heroine nor an heiress. He is a working-class man convinced—like Mary Raymond, Maria, and Sibella—of the transformative powers of education and the capacity of the independent mind to triumph over circumstances. Intriguingly, however, his tale is deeply entwined with that of a Heroine of Disinterest. As a servant awed by his powerful aristocratic lord, Caleb is feminized, placed in the position of the disempowered heroine torn between impulses of reverence and self-defense. Moreover, his persecution is the indirect consequence of the victimization of the high-minded Emily Melville a generation earlier. Her death instigated the events that drove Falkland to murder her persecutor and, later, to pursue Caleb for uncovering his guilty secret. Emily’s prominence in the inset plot suggests the continuing power of the Heroine of Disinterest. It also connects the persecution of women to that of the laboring classes, both inevitable victims of domestic tyranny in Godwin’s depiction. Finally, in presenting Emily’s story as a community recollection, Godwin contributes to the other project suggested by Caleb’s tale, investigating the power of memory—both personal and collective—to determine individual identity and social possibility. Emily’s sufferings fall well within the conventions of novels from Clarissa onward; she innovates only in dullness. Like Evelina,


Emmeline, and countless other eighteenth-century heroines, she is a potential heiress, an orphan deprived of a share of the family fortune to which she was “perhaps” entitled, as Godwin notes with an uncharacteristic hedge (40). Critics, consequently, rarely analyze the character or the workings of the story in which she appears. Jerrold Hogle describes Emily simply in terms of her conventionality, “another Clarissa imprisoned by a fallen angel,” her depiction in the inset narrative, relayed by Caleb, as evidence of his inability to escape rhetorical traditions, from the Holy Bible to The Newgate Calendar, and self-projection: “Falkland is Caleb as the tormented hero, Tyrrel is Caleb as the devilish oppressor of Falkland, Emily is Caleb as the jailed innocent.”8 Donald Wehrs similarly argues that Caleb’s rendition of Falkland’s history reveals his narrative entrapment, implying that Emily’s tale is significant primarily for demonstrating the young man’s imaginative limits—and the author’s. “Godwin’s revolt, like Caleb’s, never moves beyond dependence upon what conventions it reveals to be duplicitous: Caleb Williams remains an anti-eighteenthcentury novel that is not yet a nineteenth-century novel.”9 Yet “the sweetest innocent that ever lived” is central to the narrative precisely because of her conventionality, and that conventionality critiques more than Caleb’s rhetorical limits (95). Lacking the dignity or agency accorded Evelina, Emily St. Aubert, and Emmeline, she might more properly be called a Victim of Disinterest. With her characterization, Godwin purposefully de-sentimentalizes the protagonist of the inheritance novel by displaying the real value a society of self-interested, misogynist, and status-obsessed people would accord an unattractive, impoverished orphan, and revealing the likely consequences of a simple education and artless obedience. In so doing, he interrogates the possibility of disinterested behavior in a commercial and capitalizing economy. Like Mary Raymond, Emily Melville invokes the language of liberalism in defending herself from her tyrannical enemy, presuming self-possession and the right to reject unjust rule. But her speeches lack the resonance of those of other heroines who demand ownership over their minds and bodies, and they display an astoundingly limited view of her cousin Tyrrel’s character. Her cousin is boorish, violent, and uneducable, but for a long time she seems utterly incapable of recognizing this: “I am sure Mr. Tyrrel is a very good man, though he be a little cross now and then. He knows very well


that I am right to have a will of my own in such a thing as this, and nobody is punished for doing what is right,” she initially argues to her housekeeper, conflating the ideal with the reality of rights (52). Her direct response to her cousin is equally firm but inelegant and ineffective: “I have been used to obey you, and, in all that is reasonable, I will obey you still. But you urge me too far” (57). Like Emily St. Aubert, she speaks like a heroine, but no one is awed by her selfcommand. Emily’s ignorance of Tyrrel’s character and of her own powerlessness appears obtuse rather than transcendent. Her attempts at agency consequently seem ironic, as if Godwin, in putting the only plausible phrasing in the mouth of a young, lightly educated woman, seeks to reveal the unlikelihood of her verbal and emotional mastery of her oppressors. Women raised in ignorance have little to offer the world (she is no one’s love interest, no one’s beloved relation) and few defenses against tyrants petty or otherwise, her story suggests, despite the heroism they were traditionally accorded in sentimental fiction. Godwin denies his heroine survival, but, intriguingly, he does accord her another form of agency—not as a woman but as a paradigm. In Caleb’s retelling of Falkland’s history, Emily’s fate is presented as what Frances Ferguson calls pure history, an ideal that imagines certain events as capable of being uniformly recalled. Such overwhelming events, such as natural disasters and battles, are perceived identically by multiple people, none of whom would require more than “minimal instruction” to understand the occurrence because of its extraordinary nature.10 Unlike complex social history, pure history “relies upon the fact that one can imagine a variety of witnesses, who might come from different cultures and speak different languages but who would nevertheless be able to confirm one another’s sense that a flood or an earthquake had occurred or that thousands had perished on the battlefield. … [T]he catastrophic event always seems to qualify as an event because the description of it as a catastrophe is imagined to drive out all others.”11 Tyrrel tyrannizes over his cousin because he considers his identity to be impregnable, a birthright that no act of brutality could threaten—that is, pure history. Yet Caleb’s retelling suggests that it is the Heroine of Disinterest whose virtue is unquestioned and whose fate, consequently, is open to only one interpretation: as tragedy. Tyrrel’s cruelty renders him an outcast, as if by Lockean


associationism: “The idea irresistibly excited in every spectator of the scene, was that of regarding Mr. Tyrrel as the most diabolical wretch that had ever dishonoured the human form,” we are told (93). Godwin uses the word “irresistible” a second time to make the democratizing impulse appear inevitable: “It evidently appeared that though wealth and hereditary elevation operate as an apology for many delinquencies, there are some which so irresistibly address themselves to the indignation of mankind, that, like death, they level all distinctions, and reduce their perpetrator to an equality with the most indigent and squalid of his species” (95–6). This inset narrative, then, implies that it is the social identity of the wealthy landowner, rather than that of the poor orphan, that is unstable, and it accords the Heroine of Disinterest extraordinary political power—but only as a victim and a memory. However, by presenting Emily’s story twice-removed, through Caleb and the steward Collins, Godwin also invites the reader to consider whether even that power is specious—the retrospective and perhaps entirely imaginary interpretation of a servant who has already demonstrated his susceptibility to sentimental narrative. The language of birthright presumes we come into the world preceded by an inheritance and consequently that identity is “preformed … an incorporation of elements of family, cult and community,” in Sheldon Wolin’s phrasing.12 Rejecting birthright, Emily, Caleb, and the heroines of Hays’ and Wollstonecraft’s novels turn instead to contractual discourse, which presumes the self to be performed through exchanges on the marital and economic market: Identity so imagined “awaits construction,” Wolin demonstrates: “So it makes itself by a series of bargains. It is a negotiable and negotiated self.”13 The protagonists accordingly display a breathtaking idealism about the power of mental freedom to overcome hardships and signify self-possession. Maria and Caleb, imprisoned, both rejoice after great suffering and victimization that their minds are free, “though confined in hell itself” (Maria, 105). Maria praises independence of thought, which she physicalizes as the “nerved mind” that avoids becoming a slave to circumstances and the objects of its affections (78). Even when locked in a mental asylum, Maria retains her belief in the power of intellect to conquer not only her fears but outside evil: “But surely some expedient might occur to an active mind, without any other employment, and possessed of sufficient resolution to put


the risk of life into the balance with the chance of freedom” (62). Hays’ heroine in Victim of Prejudice also presumes that sheer force of will—independence of mind—will overcome physical, mental, and economic obstacles. “What tyranny is this?” the illegitimate and impoverished girl asks rhetorically after being told she could never marry her well-born lover. “When reason, virtue, nature, sanctify its emotions, why should the heart be controlled? Who will dare control it?” (35). In their narratives, the heroes and heroines also deploy the ideals of Romantic memory, valuing the individuality and creativity of their own recollections. Derived from Lockean epistemology and typically associated with Wordsworthian poetics, Romantic memory equates reflection with identity, as Ferguson argues. Romantic memory was crucial to Jacobin politics, Nancy Johnson contends, for it restored agency to the economically dependent, a category of beings arguably abandoned by liberal theory. The concept of selfhood as the product of memory accorded women and unpropertied men the proprietorship that was “a pre-requisite to citizenship, to proprietorship in the social contract, to the avoidance of a subjecthood that was a carryover from formal patriarchalism.”14 Accordingly, Godwin accords higher value to writers of romance than historians precisely because of their greater creativity. Whereas “the historian is confined to individual incident and individual man, and must hang upon that his invention or conjecture as he can,” Godwin argues, the novel writer can take control of his representation through projection and research. Judgment and imagination invest history with a more significant truth and consequently create a more valuable property, one that enlightens both the writer and his readers. “The writer of romance then is to be considered as the writer of real history; while he who was formerly called the historian, must be contented to step down into the place of his rival, with this disadvantage, that he is a romance writer, without the arduous, the enthusiastic and the sublime licence of imagination, that belong to that species of composition.”15 These novels portray their heroines and heroes in the exalted position of Godwin’s romance writer or Wordsworth’s visionary poet, not only sustained by creative memories but also transmitting that vision to the world. In their letters and memoirs, they seek to form a unique and inalienable self—independent of the material and


ideological demands of a culture determined to devalue them. They present their life stories as the product of their labor, both experiential and mental, “a vein of thinking that was properly [their] own,” a personal intellectual property and an educational commodity.16 In keeping with such ideals, they imagine the products of mental labor as material goods. Mary Raymond consoles herself with the mental treasures she has laid aside and her mentor assures her that mental freedom—“a firm and an independent mind” will provide an alternative to economic supremacy (38). Sibella, forbidden to leave the grounds of her uncle’s estate, believes she would acquire new physical skills and strength if he opposed her freely expressed desire to leave: “Then might Mr. Valmont try his opposing strength. But he would find, I could leap, swim, or dive; and that moats and walls are feeble barriers to a determined will” (104). Believing their “independence of mind” will overcome legal, economic, and physical barriers to survival, the persecuted heroes and heroines of these works embrace the possibility of self-salvation with an urgency reflecting despair at the possibility of rescue from a complacent society or (at times) an intractable universe.17 “Why should I inhabit a speck in this sphere when I cease to act my part, to exercise my mental strength, to benefit mankind and to dignify my nature?” asks another imaginative hero, Mary Robinson’s Walsingham, in claiming “annihilation preferable” to repression (42). Instead of retrieving a suppressed truth about their family or estate from another place or person, as in the Gothic, these writers retail their individual interpretations of actions and character. This, not a lost inheritance, constitutes their defining estate. In writing their life stories, they replace their physical and ideological inheritance with a new one—bequeathed by themselves, to themselves, through creative memory. Fenwick’s Secresy is epistolary but surprisingly retrospective nonetheless, for the heroine’s letters dwell obsessively on her emotional memories of events, not on the events themselves. When her lover Clement is sent away, Sibella burnishes recollections of their childhood together and creates icons as testaments to those memories—a tree, a rock, and tellingly, a portrait of herself drawn by his hand—become more important to her than the reality around her. She “raise[s] altars on a thousand spots in these woods, which were once hallowed by the footsteps” of her lover and imagines Clement equally dependent upon her memory: “I am his actuating


principle! Does he ever dismiss this one dear ultimate object from his thought?” she asks rhetorically, and then presumes that his true identity (like Valancourt’s in Udolpho) will be restored when he thinks of her: “Again undisturbed, self-possessed, his ardent mind returns to the dear remembrance of a past, the still dearer anticipation of future, joys—when hourly, momentarily, they shall augment with the increase of years” (249). Memories, then, provide a story of the past and serve as an investment in the future guaranteed to produce interest in the form of greater joy. Maria joyfully indulges her skill at metamemory, like Wordsworth at Tintern Abbey, reliving lost pleasures and anticipating future ones. When she returns to her native village for the first time after her disastrous marriage, the “whispered recollections of joy and hope” thaw her benumbed imagination (121). Oddly, she frolics not in actual memories but in memories of her earlier fantasies, the plans she created in her youth: “the nurtured visions of a romantic mind, bursting on [her] with all their original wildness and gay exuberance, were again hailed as sweet realities” (121). In the memoir written for her daughter, she recollects her recollections: I wandered through the churchyard in fancy, as I used sometimes to do on a Saturday evening. I recollected with what fervour I addressed the God of my youth: and once more with rapturous love looked above my sorrows to the Father of nature. I pause— feeling forcibly all the emotions I am describing; and (reminded, as I register my sorrows, of the sublime calm I have felt, when in some tremendous solitude, my soul rested on itself, and seemed to fill the universe) I insensibly breathe soft, hushing wayward emotion, as if fearing to sully with a sigh, a contentment so extatic. (113) Maria remembers not events but emotional states, restoring an ecstatic contentment unrelated to material realities. She is not even witnessing the churchyard as she recalls it. She is there only “in fancy,” attempting to revive not a reality but emotions and beliefs otherwise unsustainable—including her faith in God. In a similar sublime moment, Maria feels herself “all soul” when she declares herself free after her husband attempts to prostitute her to his friend. Released from marital obligations by her own moral code, she floats: “A seraphic


satisfaction animated, without agitating my spirits; and my imagination collected, in visions sublimely terrible, or soothingly beautiful, an immense variety of images, which nature affords, and fancy combines, of the grand and fair” (121). The exercise of mental powers to recall or project provides the mingled pleasure and pain of the sublime, suggesting the awesome and potentially destructive power not of God but of the individual human mind. Maria, in remembering her earlier recollections, recovers her consciousness of enduring identity, the “it self as it self” Locke described as the hallmark of human subjecthood; in envisioning her future, she creates it. That sublimity is connected to her ability to imagine a new future: to write her own story again, both in incident and meaning, and, crucially, pass it on to her daughter. If memory and narrative constitute the “the two major epiphenomena of consciousness, the dual defining conditions of our being human and not something else,” then these memoir-writing protagonists can be said to write themselves into being by recollecting their past as a story that demands to be communicated.18 Intriguingly, the narratives follow the structure suggested by the remembering mind, with past events doubly narrated: as they were experienced and how they can be interpreted in light of current circumstances.19 The doubled narrative allows the protagonists to recall in bitterness the social injustices they have suffered and witnessed while also recalling the extraordinary optimism of their youth, thereby providing a tone mingling hope and hopelessness and subtly suggesting the fallibility of both projection and recollection. The structure recalls that Wollstonecraft and Godwin share with Wordsworth the impulse to regard the narrative ordering of experience as “either superficial, or dangerous, or impossible,” as Gavin Edwards has noted.20 Indeed, memory’s lapses and inconsistencies are an obvious danger to subjectivity so constructed. In memory as in fiction, imagining the self into being depends on a narrative that is fragile and potentially incommunicable. Memory may make the man (or woman), but that identity is entirely fictitious, a mutable product of the imagination, Locke recognized and Hume argued in his Treatise of Human Nature: “identity is nothing really belonging to these different perceptions, and uniting them together; but is merely a quality, which we attribute to them.”21 In recalling and repeating the events they consider formative, the protagonists of these radical novels investigate the possibilities but also the dangers of memory


so construed. Narrative imposes order on memory, but it can endlessly re-order or, worse, prove incoherent to a society of obstinate, self-interested, or ignorant beings. Moreover, that self keeps inventing itself in tracks already laid down by stories of romance and, of course, inheritance. One of the gravest perils to the recollected self is what cognitive scientists call retrospective bias. Retrospective bias is the tendency to adapt one’s memory of past events to accord with new knowledge. What is later recalled alters not only because the memory fades but because of factors such as how one feels: moods cast their glow on recollected experience, reshaping memories into the likeness of the present mind. While an adaptable memory enables psychological survival by promoting “benign fictions of the self,” adaptable memory imposes a heavy burden—the imperative to retrospectively reevaluate one’s previous actions in light of unintended consequences.22 “What is at issue, then,” Ferguson writes, “is not the possibility that other people will judge one differently from the way in which one judges oneself. It is, rather, that the impact of one’s actions on other people come to cause one to reevaluate what one’s actions were—and that the extension of the time of such remembrance increases the liability that one incurs in the process.”23 Retrospective bias inevitably suggests that one should have known what would happen. It attacks from within.24 The narrative arc of these works reflects this concern with memory. In Maria and Caleb Williams, as well as in Walsingham, writers recollect their life from childhood to young adulthood, narrating hundreds of pages from the perspective of a moment of crisis; in the final pages, however, new information dramatically reverses the meaning of the previous volumes. In reversing the protagonists’ interpretations of their lovers or persecutors, the conclusions demand a terrifying recognition of the inadequacy of experience and analysis to guide behavior: What they imagined were tales of inalterable truth—their idealism and victimization—turn into another truth, about the power of the mind to imprison as well as liberate, about the impossibility of telling pure history. Locke argued that memories make the man; Godwin and Wollstonecraft reveal that the man (and the woman) also makes the memories—and can unmake them. Maria, Caleb, and Sibella are all depicted ultimately as victims of narrative conventions, whether those imposed by others or by


themselves. Maria becomes possessed by a tale of the future that she invents and supplies with evidence: the romance-rescue plot of the inheritance novel. She falls in love with her fellow inmate Darnford by reading his marginalia and imagining a new story for the two of them together. From his comments on Rousseau (tellingly) she constructs a soul mate, her vulnerability to such fantasies increased by her suffering. “Having had to struggle incessantly with the vices of mankind, Maria’s imagination found repose in portraying the possible virtues the world might contain. Pygmalion formed an ivory maid, and longed for an informing soul. She, on the contrary, combined all the qualities of a hero’s mind, and fate presented a statue in which she might enshrine him” (78). Like Rousseau imagining Sophie into being as Emile’s perfect helpmate, Maria under stress imagines a chivalrous hero. Heroes must be imagined, since they apparently are not formed in late-eighteenth-century English society. Such false heroes, however, provide cold comfort; Darnford shares more with Rousseau than Maria imagined, abandoning her and their child. Moreover, her delusion reveals her susceptibility to narrative traditions that imagined, Burke-style, that painful disadvantages could be salvaged by the intervention of a chivalrous man, inspired by his tears to man his sword. Mary Robinson, a member of the Wollstonecraft-Godwin circle, also deploys the typical plotline of the novel of inheritance to suggest the entrapping power of narrative conventions. The sensitive hero of her 1797 Walsingham structures his identity around an entirely illusory set of events. When displaced from his relatives’ hearts and property by the birth of their child, he, bizarrely, casts himself in the role of the Heroine of Disinterest. He crafts his life’s story into a familiar tale of dispossession even though he was never securely in line for an inheritance. Yet he is no Heroine of Disinterest, but deeply interested. After learning of his cousin’s birth, he, like Inchbald’s Matilda, casts a longing eye over the family property—“the bath, the paddock, the plantations, and the ponies, [that now] were by anticipation bestowed on the expected heir of Glenowen” (60). He construes the world into mine and thine, and cannot love a landscape he does not possess, no longer perceiving its beauties but seeing instead only “the woods, the streams, the lawns, the meadows, which were to enrich the little stranger,—the unborn object of [his] hatred” (62). So enchanting is this vision of himself as a dispossessed


heir that he misreads the most fundamental eighteenth-century structure of knowledge: gender. The cousin he considered his rival in love, family affection, and inheritance proves to be no heir but an heiress who wants to be his wife and give, rather than steal, property. She is a woman, and therefore he is a man, and consequently no victim after all. Unlike Maria and Caleb, Walsingham has a happy ending—the cousin lives, marries him, and shares the estate—but not before the hero confronts the power of the demon memory to dismantle the self. Presented with the knowledge of his uncle’s generous will and his usurping cousin’s gender, he must revise his memories and like Caleb recognize his agency and potential guilt. With the discovery he is “shrunk almost to annihilation” (491), his self-conception as a “benignant child of pity” upended (494). It is from this moment of crisis that the previous volumes have been narrated, and accordingly, his story begins with self-torment: He “cannot reflect” (41) and therefore has “no prospect” and only a “horrid retrospect” (42). Guilt rules him and memories imprison him. “Oh, Memory! Busy, barbarous demon! Restless, inexorable tormentor! When wilt thou let me steal a moment from myself and thee?—Never!” (43). A mountain blast “awaken[s his] aching memory to an accumulation of anguish” (494). He is a victim, like Caleb Williams, of retrospective bias, but he was earlier victim to narrative bias—eager to cast his story into the familiar mode of victimization. Godwin’s novel provides the most thorough exploration of recollection: the ways in which the remembered past can construct and deform character and agency. Caleb Williams, like Maria, is consumed by a story, in love with narrative. Even the pleasure of physical action becomes significant only when narrativized: Tall, strong and supple, the young Caleb excels in physical activity but rejects “village gambols,” instead delighting to read of such feats and finding himself “particularly interested by tales in which corporeal ingenuity or strength are the means resorted to for supplying resources and conquering difficulties” (6). Because he is endlessly curious about “mechanical invention,” he claims, in a seeming non sequitur, as a young man he had “an invincible attachment to books of narrative and romance,” which somehow fulfilled that need for discovering the workings of the world: “I read, I devoured compositions of this sort. They took possession of my soul; and the effects


they produced were frequently discernible in my external appearance and my health” (6). Narrative, by definition, takes the form of a recollection, whether personal or social. Caleb is preparing for his own future as a man who not only acts (“village gambols”) but also recalls. Yet Caleb Williams’ narrative is vanquished by his own finest quality—his pity. In the final shocking reversal, his empathy for the aged Falkland deprives him of all ability to remember his own story of suffering. He replaces his own tale with Falkland’s, in the most alarming and expansive form of retrospective bias suggested by these novels. The novel’s concern with narrative power helps explain the necessity for the long inset narrative retelling Falkland’s youth and crimes, often treated by critics as an aesthetic blunder. Given that Falkland’s life story in fact consumes Caleb himself, it is fitting that its retelling should take up all but the first chapter of Volume 1 of his memoirs. The story is provided by Falkland’s steward Collins, but Caleb drops the intermediary voice, claiming that he will “assume to be myself the historian of our patron” to avoid confusion (11). The servant “imbibes” the tale, to use a verb Godwin reserves for descriptions of information unthinkingly absorbed. (The first two sentences of the inset provide us with Falkland’s fatal flaw: having “imbibed” the “love of chivalry and romance” from the tales of his youth, he believed steadfastly that birth and honor created heroism.)25 The steward’s memories become Caleb’s own.26 By treating Collins’ story as his own experience, Caleb allows the story to shape his world view—the danger often cited in eighteenth-century diatribes against fiction and humorously explored in novels from Lennox’s Female Quixote (1752) to Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1817). The story becomes a memory Caleb cannot escape, even as he attempts to write his own tale of victimization. Caleb Williams also suffers from the corrosive power of what Ferguson calls circumstantial memory, the apparent reverse of the justificatory tendency of retrospective bias: “the pressure of an expanded moral obligation, an obligation to reexamine one’s own past actions to see if their value has been altered by subsequent events.”27 Circumstantial memory increases responsibility and guilt by incorporating present knowledge (of, say, the unintended consequences of one’s actions) into the redescribed “memory” of a previous event. Like Walsingham, Caleb rewrites his understanding of himself


and of history in the final pages of his memoir. When he finally confronts Falkland in person, in a court of law, the man he sees is not the Falkland he had constructed in his mind. He concludes that he has placed an unjustified faith in his own disinterested judgment, bitterly reviews the rationales he no longer accepts, and bizarrely recognizes himself as the “author” of this man’s criminality (330). He dismisses all his previous actions as misguided and criminal, concluding with little evidence that the older man, with his “noble nature,” would have relented had he only told his story (334). Strikingly, however, in a narrative largely driven by his inability to gain credibility, he has finally found a story someone will believe: the observers at trial cry in sympathy as he condemns himself for pursuing Falkland. This is, after all, the story they had already imposed upon events—that of an overreaching, ungrateful servant. But this new story is self-annihilating: Caleb resigns his only property, his carefully crafted sense of identity as a victim of social tyranny: “I began these memoirs with the idea of vindicating my character. I have now no character that I wish to vindicate,” he writes (337). Character may be inalienable, but inalienability has its perils. Similarly, at novel’s end, Fenwick’s Sibella finds her memories void of meaning after a shocking reversal. When the carefully polished memories that gave shape to her limited existence are shattered, she simply wills herself physically as well as mentally out of existence. After discovering that her lover has married a widowed heiress, she cannot recognize herself, or him, in the memories she retains: “Give me not a name … I own none! What am I? a shadow! A dream!” She accuses Clement of murdering her, and asks that he be requested, accordingly, to murder her name as well (356). Sibella, like Caleb and Maria, is a victim not only of society but also of herself—her inability to recast her role, to remember herself differently. The layered narratives of these works reject the possibilities of a heroic mental escape from material reality—the fantasy to which the heroes and heroines cling. In so doing, they also cast doubt upon the power of the story of suffering to re-educate society. The heroes and heroines of these novels repeatedly proclaim the importance of education to self-fulfillment as well as any chance for economic and emotional independence. They also imagine their stories as educational properties, capable of teaching the world a new lesson. Like Godwin in composing Caleb Williams, the memoirists Caleb and


Maria hope to create incidents and psychology so vivid that they will reshape the reader: to “write a tale, that shall constitute an epoch in the mind of the reader, that no one, after he has read it, shall ever be exactly the same man that he was before.”28 They imagine themselves, through recollection, transforming public events into private but shared intellectual property. These works simultaneously mark both the peak of educational optimism and, in the utter failure of the protagonists’ plans, its abyss. Even when imprisoned in a madhouse, Maria plans her infant’s future and imagines her maternal lessons will enable her survival: “Let me but give her an education—let me but prepare her body and mind to encounter the ills which await her sex,” she begs her prison guard, and, in her memoirs, attempts to do so second-hand (94). Victim’s Mary Raymond is vociferous in her educational faith, which her tutor has stirringly summarized for her in recounting his achievements: “I have laboured to awaken, excite, and strengthen your mind. An enlightened intellect is the highest of human endowments; if affords us an inexhaustible sources of power, dignity, and enjoyment … Their favoured possessors are the genuine sovereigns of mankind: they direct, they model, they govern, the world” (28). Caleb relies upon his education for surety, solemnly charting his acquisitions of knowledge, which he continues to increase and reiterate throughout the text. Along with natural philosophy and mechanical invention, he credits himself, like Pamela, with the benefits of lower birth, described as “an education free from the usual sources of depravity, and the inheritance, long since lost by their unfortunate progeny! Of an honest fame” (5). Earlier novels hold out the dream that some combination of personality, instruction, and experience—no matter how difficult to configure—would create a person of both individual and social value, a person whose worth would be instantly discernible by the equally sensible or benevolent. That ideal is enacted in the countless scenes in which a protector or hero—or reader, directed by the narrator— perceives virtue in the sensitive face of the heroine. That worthiness is often described in terms of interest. Udolpho’s narrator assures us that Emily St. Aubert’s sensibility lent a pensive softness to her manner and “rendered her a very interesting object to persons of a congenial disposition,” those who had not lost their perceptiveness of virtue by mingling in the world’s “contagious circle” (5). Frances Burney’s


eponymous heroine Camilla (1796) has a captivating air as well, we are told, a grace that lends her an “interest which … render[ed] her the first object of the house” (51). Burney’s heiress Cecilia is more indebted to nature than fortune, given the magnitude of her charms: “[H]er form was elegant, her heart was liberal; her complexion varied with every emotion of her soul, and her eyes, the heralds of her speech, now beamed with understanding and now glistened with sensibility” (6). Inchbald’s Miss Milner possesses such “lively elegance and dignified simplicity” that her new guardian and his housemates are astounded: “they gazed at her, and at each other alternately, with wonder!” (14). The heroines who do not convince with their faces persuade with their texts: Pamela’s journal eventually wins over not only Mr. B but the entire community, her tale of virtue in distress trumping all alternative narratives. Her letters verify her sweetness and justify her fellow servants’ trust, proving her superior to self-interest. Yet no one reads Caleb Williams’ features or admires Maria’s sensitive countenance. Mary Raymond’s beauty only serves to attract her rapist, she assures us in chapter one: “[T]he graces, with which nature had so liberally endowed me, proved a material link in the chain of events, that led to the subsequent incidents of my life; a life embittered by unrelenting persecution, and marked by undeserved calamities” (6). Mary, Caleb, and Maria all find their heartfelt stories discounted by individuals and legal representatives. Caleb obsessively attempts to convince mentors, magistrates, and companions of Falkland’s persecution. What he finds is that his story is remarkably unstable, not only in the community but also in his own mind. The torment of a male servant, it seems, does not yet “irresistibly address [itself] to the indignation of mankind,” leveling all distinctions and creating pure history (95–6). When Maria pleads her rights before a judge deliberating adultery charges, she is told that if women were allowed to “plead their feelings”—to be given credit for their suffering—the social system would collapse (145). Mary Raymond does not even attempt to pursue rape charges, given her rapist’s social position. “What testimony or witnesses can you produce that will not make against you?” demands her antagonist, Sir Peter Osborne. “Who would support you against my wealth and influence?” (119). Hays’ novel exceeds even Wollstonecraft’s and Godwin’s in its despair at the prospects for individual stories of disinterested behavior to educate and empower. Notably, Mary Raymond leaves no child on


whom to bestow her wisdom. Her own mother’s story of seduction and murder was intended to prepare her for a misogynist society. The manuscript, combined with her foster-father’s tutelage, was meant to cultivate her rationality, fortitude, self-respect, and defiance—the ability to “contemn the tyranny that would impose fetters of sex upon her mind” (69). But like her mother, Mary is persecuted and imprisoned and in the end bitterly reflects upon her female fate: “Entangled in a series of unavoidable circumstances, hemmed in by insuperable obstacles, overwhelmed by a torrent of resistless prejudice, wearied with opposition, and exhausted by conflict, I yield, at length, to a destiny against which precautions and struggles have been alike fruitless,” she writes as she is dying in prison (41). Property systems, Carol Rose argues, are inexplicable without narrative. In this period of economic transformation, stories about property multiply in wildly different directions, from Sir Robert Filmer’s patriarchal story imagining Adam as the first father and the king and fathers as his descendants, to Locke’s labor theory and Rousseau’s tale of natural innocence gradually corrupted. Theorists and fiction writers of the period suggest, alternately, that stable wealth creates either the leisure for self-development or the conditions for idleness and selfaggrandizement; that fluctuating commercial wealth inspires either mean-spiritedness, avariciousness, and competitiveness or sociability and independent-mindedness; that property is the guardian of all the rights or the institution that keeps women and the lower classes perpetually stripped of rights. Rose attributes the period’s Arabian Nights of property stories to theorists’ need to elide the illogicalities inevitable in any property regime. I would add that property itself is a powerful storyteller in an established society, in which every commodity, every estate, and even every face implies a well-known cultural story. The sprawling estate is an icon for a tale of long-held wealth; the welltended cottage for industry; the carriage for the display of status. Even a mechanical pineapple tells a story about either English ingenuity or its waste in a consumer culture increasingly drawn, like the French, to “mere shows” (Burney, Evelina, 42). Believing that with their stories they can reform a society run on prejudice and laws that institutionalize inequality, the protagonists are educated by experience into victimization. Property relations, they discover, block an entire society from learning its lesson. Social memory, which in the Radcliffean Gothic eventually restores justice,


in these novels is prescription and prejudice, alarmingly resistant to overwriting. The Dorothees and Josephs cannot be taught a new tale, or, rather, are always already programmed into the hierarchy of social relations. Rather than recalling the suppressed history of the aristocratic family, including its crimes of dispossession, the uneducated servants respond ferociously to any presumed attack on the nobility of their lords. Caleb’s fellow servant and childhood friend, Thomas, charges him with ingratitude to his master for reviving the story of his guilt, his hatred intensified by the fact that Falkland has apparently done his runaway servant a kindness, delivering a small sum of money for Caleb’s relief. The servant Gines is Falkland’s machine, more relentless than the old man could possibly be in his pursuit of Caleb. Caleb’s former mentor Collins turns against him as well, despite their long history of mutual affection. Caleb believes him to be his potential savior, the one man who knows him well enough to recognize his innocence, but the man he calls father prefers to condemn him rather than believe that Falkland is “a suborner and murderer” (320). Not only is he incapable of imagining that Falkland is guilty, he is unwilling to risk the “comforts of [his] life” by supporting Caleb (320). Wealth, titles, and status still tell a more powerful cultural story than a servant can write. Wealth not only interferes with education—it renders education impossible, instructing legions of beings to aspire to live out the wrong stories. These writers take Lockean associationism to its logical extreme, depicting property as mind-altering, its most significant achievement as what Rose calls “an almost invisible educational institution.”29 Riches entice the wealthy into bestowing their affections on the wrong objects, argues Godwin, “depriv[ing] their possessor of the genuine powers of understanding, and render[ing] him incapable of discerning absolute truth.”30 The spectacle of inequality is the school that teaches all members of an unjust society callousness so profound that they are rendered incapable of understanding virtue, he maintains.31 Like Anna Barbauld in her essay “On Education” (1825), he implies that neither “maxims” nor “purchased tuition” can overcome the experience of landed life. “Do you ask, then, what will educate your son?” Barbauld rhetorically asks a self-made man and his wife, parents finally of a long-desired heir, who seek her advice. Property and possessions, she responds, will inevitably teach him—and not for good. “Your example will educate him; your conversation with your friends; the business


he sees you transact; the likings and dislikings you express; these will educate him … your domestics will educate him; above all, your rank and situation in life, your house, your table, your pleasure-grounds, your hounds and your stables will educate him.”32 Comparing wealth to a pedagogical Achilles’ heel, Barbauld contends that advice will simply intensify the bad lessons. In a character sketch of the pupil reminiscent of Fitzwilliam Darcy, she describes the counterproductivity of parental instruction by projecting their infant’s future character: “The lectures that are given him on condescension and affability, only prove to him upon how much higher ground he stands than those about him; and the very pains that are taken with his moral character will make him proud, by showing him how much he is the object of attention” (316). Only suffering and loss can re-educate the heir, she contends. Radical novels, like earlier works, abound with the familiar figure of the indulged heir, from Godwin’s boorish Tyrrel to Hays’ Sir Peter Osborne, men so unaccustomed to self-restraint that they quickly descend to violence. A more subtle portrait of miseducation emerges in the mixed characters of these works, however. In Victim of Prejudice, the heroine’s beloved, William, is ardent and loving, yet he cannot defy his destiny as an heir, despite an upbringing by an ideal tutor, and eventually turns into a “man of the world” and marries an heiress (32). So, in fact, does the heroine’s love interest in Secresy, who, although raised in an otherwise identical situation with Sibella, is transformed by his awareness of his potential inheritance from his foster father. He believes himself an heir, and even when disinherited, finds he can only seek pleasure and luxury. Similarly, Maria’s Darnford disappears in pursuit of an inheritance. Raised in a corrupt, property-obsessed culture, individuals inevitably associate certain pieces of property with certain narratives and attempt to live out those misbegotten dreams, Godwin and Wollstonecraft suggest. Indeed, Godwin claims, “nothing … more powerfully tends to distort our judgment and opinions, than erroneous notions concerning the goods of fortune,” which inspire a nearinstantaneous desire for possession and, if acquired, a continued anxiety about guarding them.33 Landed property spawns visions of dazzling with riches and commanding sycophants. Like the nabob of Secresy, who awakes each morning frightened at the prospect of loss, wealth haunts rather than comforts.34 In conferring a social identity,


then, wealth paradoxically strips individuals of agency and selfhood: No longer exerting themselves physically through wage-earning labor or mentally in discerning true virtue, men and women wander like hollow beings, learning together in the lost kingdom of England to adorn their bodies or their homes or their pockets in an attempt to create an identity in someone else’s eyes. Godwin even rejects the most favored of mini-stories justifying inequality—charity. He sees the pleasures of benevolence as a corruption, arguing that those with excess wealth have no real right to that excess and that, accordingly, in dispensing charity the wealthy are simply taking credit for a “generosity with what is not truly their own, and to purchase the gratitude of the poor by payment of a debt.”35 The poor, in turn, are misled into feeling an unnecessary gratitude and humiliating servility, blinded to the fact that the goods necessary for survival are their birthright. To Godwin, even the signal act of sensibility is a corrupt gesture—part of an insidious ideology. Those with enough to share by definition possess stolen property; benevolent aristocrats are in fact like con artists who return the goods they robbed for the enormous reward proffered. All the actors misinterpret the play in which they are acting. The literary landscape of the 1790s is strewn with dead Heroines of Disinterest, victimized by their idealism about education, their faith in their fathers real or chosen, and their selfless benevolence. By writing inheritance into history, Wollstonecraft, Godwin, Fenwick, Hays, and Robinson write it out of fiction, stripping the popular story of the well-educated but dispossessed heiress of its power. While heroines continue to regain lost property in Victorian fiction (such as Jane Eyre), men (like Charles Dickens’ Pip) rather than women increasingly dominate the inheritance plot. (Indeed, heirs take over so securely in Victorian fiction that scholars tend to engage in a bit of retrospective bias, ignoring the earlier works in claiming that the inheritance plot is a masculine tradition.) Heroines like Clarissa consequently are replaced by women like Elizabeth Bennet, who can calmly dismiss the offer to marry the unpleasant Mr. Collins and keep the family estate within the immediate family, and Jane Eyre, who glories in the inheritance that restores her psychological as well as financial independence. In the nineteenth century, the heroine takes on new interests, most notably, herself.

Conclusion: Austenian Disinterest

This book has argued that the late eighteenth-century novel helped modernize the relations among property, education, and identity. It did so in part by reconstituting the ancient ideal of disinterest, a virtue placed under siege by political upheaval and a burgeoning capitalist ethos. The novel of inheritance, I have argued, rescued disinterest by regendering it, embodying the quality in a new character type: the Heroine of Disinterest, a young woman who defied the imperative to accord economic interests the highest value. Associating disinterest with women not only constituted an extraordinary reversal in the history of gender constructs but also proved to be a crucial maneuver in the larger transformation from status to character. These fictional works represented disinterest as the product of education and self-scrutiny, and in so doing, freed subjectivity from its ties to proprietorship. Rather than the consequence of economic security and an aristocratic education, selflessness is the product of experience, reflection, and memory. This revision democratized disinterest, understood, by century’s end, as a scrupulous investigation of one’s own inevitable biases and a forceful rejection of custom and prejudice in favor of a rigorous and hard-fought intellectual independence. Disinterest so understood is an attitude, dependent on a peculiarly modern form of self-division as well as self-education, and its fruits—objective wisdom and consequently selflessness—are presumed to be ideal and consequently only rarely and momentarily achieved.

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In its modern form, disinterest is a mode of judgment that rises above private concerns “to establish what might justly be called a realm of dependably common knowledge,” Michael McKeon argues.1 Disinterest so construed demands the ability to inhabit the kind of double consciousness necessary to gain the “view from nowhere,” in Thomas Nagel’s memorable phrasing. Such a view combines “the perspective of a particular person inside the world with an objective view of the same world, the persona and the viewpoint included.”2 Yet rather than creating the cynical disengagement of a Mr. Bennet, such disinterest creates the possibility of active moral engagement. Such a capacity restores the “possibilities of a world that gets beyond mere contentions for power” and “the human capacity to work toward these ideals, to act, sometimes, somehow, with a sense of the needs and interests of others.”3 Jane Austen perfects such a model of subjectivity in Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion, novels in which the heroines are characterized by their self-analysis, their scrupulous attention to the morality of everyday choices, and their sharp eye for the workings of social conventions. Austen’s novels can be said to provide an intimate portrait of the workings of disinterest relocated to private life, the culmination of the internalization and domestication of disinterest. In earlier novels, protagonists repeatedly display their disinterest by remaining unswayed by economic interests; that high-mindedness is manifested through self-sacrificing acts of charity, refusals to marry for wealth, and displays of emotional generosity. By Austen, however, female disinterest no longer needs to be exhaustively performed. No scenes of tearful charity or filial gratitude are necessary to establish the heroine’s ability to find values outside of status or property, wealth, and consumerism. Austenian disinterest accordingly is best understood as a characteristic vision. While Anne Elliot’s disinterest is already in place at the novel’s beginning—the consequence of early suffering—Pride and Prejudice is a novel about the difficulty of crafting and maintaining such a stance. It’s the story of disinterest in process, maintained and refined despite the odds. Elizabeth Bennet learns the limits of objectivity but, in so doing, gains greater understanding of herself and those who surround her. These novels’ performance of disinterest relocates the premodern ideal associated with the lord of the manor to women of wit and intelligence who will be leaders in their families and communities.

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When democratized, disinterest becomes the consequence not of great expectations but of no expectations, as I have argued—and inevitably, the province of not only women of limited economic resources like Elizabeth but also the neglected Anne Elliot. An allbut-discarded daughter whose dowry will be endlessly deferred to her father’s debts and who is keenly aware of the moral failings of her family members, Anne is freed from interest into disinterest. Anne recognizes the mental enslavement created by aristocratic ties, which have trapped her father and sisters in a fruitless search to ensure the consequence and the social character they feel is their due. Sir Walter Elliot’s place in the Baronetage nourishes him with the feudal fantasy of a stable identity, replicable across generations, even as his reliance upon carriages and equipage suggests the insecurity of his position and his neglect of duties signifies the barrenness of the honor associated with his title. Released from interest by moral choice as well as neglect, Anne is the ideal match for Wentworth—a nobody in her family’s eyes. Although never seen handing out charity to strangers in the signal act of female disinterest, she qualifies as a Heroine of Disinterest. Her comprehensive gaze manifests itself as she accurately assesses the needs of others as well as the consequences of their self-absorption. Accordingly, she nudges Benwick out his solipsistic poetry reading, maintains enough distance to act appropriately after Louisa’s fall, and acknowledges but resists the lure of regaining her status as Lady Elliot. These are not simply acts of goodness borne of intelligence and morality; they are acts made possible by disinterest, understood as the ability to absent one’s own needs from the analysis of virtuous action. Unlike Elizabeth Bennet, Anne Elliot enters the novel with her disinterest perfected; what is wanting is for Wentworth to recognize this virtue for what it is. Her final claim that she made the right decision in rejecting Wentworth at nineteen is often disparaged for its apparent retreat into self-abnegation. It should be understood, though, that she is reconsidering not the propriety of the initial engagement (which she has long been convinced of) but the consequences of her own emotional entanglement, while still a teen, with Lady Russell. In retrospect, she believes she would have paid an enormous emotional tax for disregarding her godmother’s opinion. She had not yet achieved the self-possession to act entirely on her own judgment.


Elizabeth Bennet is also a Heroine of Disinterest, in that she takes seriously her obligation as a community member to find a form of “dependably common knowledge,” unswayed by personal interests, convention, or the force of public opinion. In following Elizabeth’s developing self-awareness, Pride and Prejudice tracks the difficulty of maintaining disinterest. Elizabeth is a detective collecting clues, analyzing the logical probabilities of truth inhering in a piece of gossip or a ballroom assessment of character and eventually remaking her mind once she’s come to recognize the biases that mislead her. She repeatedly acknowledges the difficulty of maintaining the comprehensive gaze. Indeed, even while succumbing to the general opinion about Darcy’s intolerable conceit after the ball, she wryly acknowledges that she “might have forgiven his pride” if he had not mortified hers.4 Disinterest is an onerous and indeed sometimes impossible task, in need of constant supervision. It is cultivated through experience and relentless self-scrutiny. Elizabeth accordingly strengthens her disinterest by recognizing the ease with which she was deceived by Wickham—having failed to take into account the oddity of his immediately discussing intimate matters. Through Darcy’s revelations, she also learns, as Rachel Brownstein bluntly puts it, how she looks to her neighbors. It is precisely this self-division that gives her agency and that constitutes the disinterested viewpoint. As Brownstein also notes of Elizabeth, her “greatest charm … is her gift of disengaging herself,” whether from the transparent maneuverings of a Miss Bingley or the thin skin of the new husband—or her own capacity for self-deceit.5 Elizabeth maintains the “power of detachment” that Amanda Anderson considers a distinctive topos of the Victorian period. Describing disinterest and related attempts at a comprehensive and objective stance as “an aspiration more than a certainty” but one that was central to Victorians’ ambivalent engagement with modernity, she analyzes the ways in which writers from John Stuart Mill to Oscar Wilde “explore in a sustained way what it means to cultivate a distanced relation toward one’s self, one’s community, or those objects that one chooses to study or represent.”6 Austen’s heroines, I suggest, inaugurate that investigations with their recognition of the powers and perils of disinterest, a vision that would come to represent “the distinct promises of modernity: progressive knowledge, full comprehension of the social totality, and the possibilities of transformative understanding.”7

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The double vision of Austen’s heroines represents itself stylistically, of course, in irony and the related capacity for metanarrative, both of which demand a certain distance between the fantasy and the reality of self as well as between conventions and their deployment. Elizabeth Bennet can amuse herself and torment her silent partner by reminding Darcy of the tiresome conversational sallies expected between dance partners. Anne can repeatedly reflect upon how irrelevant one’s own obsessions appear to those outside one’s community, a form of self-abnegation crucial to the disinterested gaze. Upon her arrival at Uppercross, for example, she recalls the importance of “knowing our own nothingness beyond our own circle,” recognizes how valuable such knowledge would be to the “other Elliots,” and notes that even she must continually be jarred into perceiving this truth. Anne is the Heroine of Disinterest perfected, but even she must constantly realign her vision. With typical self-deprecation, she resolves to take the only possible course and “resolve to avoid such self-delusion in future.”8 The disinterested constantly seek and analyze information, both factual and emotional, and continually update their estimates of self and other; they continually self-educate. The self-interested in Austen, however, are ineducable, utterly incapable of adopting the comprehensive viewpoint necessary to extend their system of values beyond the pursuit of status and wealth. They are the static but memorable comic characters so clearly divided from those whom we are meant to take seriously for their possibility of self-knowledge and development. Incapable of the distancing perspective of the heroine, the relentlessly self-interested perform their roles with desperate urgency. They utterly inhabit their roles as an imperious baronet, a demanding daughter, or even a well-established widow. Mrs. Bennet, like her young daughter Lydia, is in thrall to red coats and well-trimmed hats, age having done nothing but sharpen her acquisitive eye. Circumstances such as indebtedness do not educate Sir Walter Elliot into a recognition of flux. With few exceptions, the heroines’ families cannot comprehend the “view from nowhere” which the protagonists strive to maintain: Elizabeth Bennet is as unfathomable to her mother as to the Bingley sisters, and Anne Elliot is an enigma to her father and sisters and even Lady Russell, albeit one they do not wish to solve. Because female disinterest is firmly established as the signal trait of the heroine by the nineteenth century, Austen can subtly toy with


the paradigm, much as she recasts the conventions of the Gothic and of sensibility in her earlier works. Evidence of Austen’s playful daring can be found in Elizabeth Bennet’s claim to have fallen in love with Darcy upon “first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley,” a reference that has bedeviled critics since at least Sir Walter Scott (301). Scott’s citation of her remark as evidence of her newly developed “prudence” routinely gets recovered by those critics who wish to lessen its irony.9 Scott was not “entirely” wrong for reducing Elizabeth’s reversal to “crass materialist motives,” writes Karen Newman, since Elizabeth’s growing self-knowledge surely includes “a growing recognition of her ‘interest.’”10 Similarly, Brownstein notes the “matter-of-fact materialism of the heroine, who unromantically sighs out her desire to have the place!”11 Such comments support the common analysis of Elizabeth’s maturation as an acceptance of the importance of her “economic self-interest.”12 Yet Elizabeth’s comment, like her letter to her aunt acknowledging her delight in the expectation of taking out the ponies at Pemberley, is only made possible by the reader’s faith in its self-awareness. Only when Elizabeth’s disinterest (and, in cultural history, the possibility of female disinterest) is accepted as a given can such remarks be made. What Elizabeth is acknowledging is not her acquisitiveness but the inevitability that women like her mother and the Bingley sisters will presume that her marriage is a mercenary one—and that her disinterested choice of exactly “the man who, in disposition and talents, would most suit her” will indeed bring rich rewards (252). Because she is disinterested rather than mercenary, however, she deserves and accepts such rewards with quiet pleasure. What is new to the Austenian novel is not that a woman marries for “interest.” It is that the heroine can marry for love, her disinterest so secure in the reader’s mind that she can be allowed to joke about the possibility of mercenary motives—and, more tellingly, acknowledge the difficulty of separating out one’s motivations. “Self,” we can be assured, “though it would intrude, could not engross her” (226). Her arch remarks about Pemberley’s appeal signal Elizabeth’s continued awareness of the possibility of economic interests to sway decisionmaking—an awareness that is, paradoxically, the signature of disinterest. Austen is not asking her heroines to disavow pleasure in ponies and estates, only to recognize their pleasure and accordingly weigh it against

Conclusion 145

other more worthy ones. Indeed, if marrying for financial gain were to be considered the sign of Elizabeth’s maturity, we would have been invited to bemoan her rejection of Mr. Collins well before Mr. Darcy was a real possibility. Marrying her cousin and her father’s heir would, after all, have been the conventional solution to her family’s serious financial dilemma. Indeed, an earlier novel would have at least had the heroine agonize over her decision not to sacrifice her own repose for her mother and sisters’ future comfort. Someone with more power than her mother would have vowed to “make her know” that Mr. Collins constitutes “her own interest” (93). Elizabeth’s prejudice initially compromises her disinterested judgment. Darcy’s disinterest, in turn, is threatened by his aristocratic education. Darcy’s description of his upbringing neatly summarizes the influence of assured wealth as typically described in the late-eighteenth-century novel, from Samuel Richardson’s Mr. B to the heroine’s feckless lover in Eliza Fenwick’s Secresy. Spoiled and indulged by parents who regarded him as the bearer of the estate, Darcy bemoans that he was left to follow “good principles” in “pride and conceit.” The family’s secure wealth “almost taught [him] to be selfish and overbearing—to care for none beyond my own family circle, to think meanly of all the rest of the world, to wish at least to think meanly of their sense and worth compared with my own” (297). Yet like Mr. B and unlike many of his other predecessors, Darcy is highly educable, something Elizabeth’s tour of Pemberley reveals. When she sees that his grounds are tasteful, natural, and unostentatious, in contrast to those of his aunt, she discovers that she has overestimated his entrapment to custom and prejudice—the failings of the gentleman’s upbringing. Darcy’s civility to Elizabeth’s middling-ranked aunt and uncle further reveals that, humbled by Elizabeth, he now is eager to overcome the lingering effects of an education in wealth and luxury. He can engage in “counterpedagogy,” a move Michael McKeon cites as crucial in the democratization of disinterest. Darcy’s improved disinterest manifests itself as “a state of mind divested of customary assumptions, a process of defamiliarization theoretically available … to all observers, whatever the particular ‘family’ of assumptions in which they are customarily embedded.”13 In Lockean terms, Darcy is no longer enslaved to tradition; his understanding is freed. The charge of irredeemable pride, of course, is smoothly transferred to Lady Catherine, who


displays the aristocratic failings of self-absorption and self-promotion, reflected in everything from her oversized chimney to her prognostications on the weather to her unseemly pleasure in gathering about fawning dependents such as Mr. Collins. It is quite clear that she, unlike her nephew, is ineducable in the virtues of disinterest. The Heroine of Disinterest, arguably, ends her career in Austen’s novels, as the ideal vision becomes the goal of male as well as female characters and animates, as Anderson outlines, a range of intellectual and aesthetic concerns no longer tied tightly to issues of gender and property. The character type, meanwhile, is replaced by a more reductive concept: The Angel in the House, the wife and mother imagined by the nineteenth century to serve as the moral center of the family and consequently the nation. Sarah Stickney Ellis’ ideal of the beatific wife waiting by the hearth, capable at day’s end of washing the taint off the nineteenth-century commercial man, eviscerates disinterest, limiting it to simple self-abnegation and ignorance. For what is the Englishwoman “most valued, admired and beloved?” Ellis asks rhetorically in 1839, before responding emphatically to her own question: “In answer to this, I have little hesitation in saying,—For her disinterested kindness.” Her elaboration describes the descendant of the Heroine of Disinterest, now in her maternal role: Look at all the heroines, whether of romance or reality—at all the female characters that are held up to universal admiration—at all who have gone down to honoured graves, amongst the tears and the lamentations of their survivors. Have these been the learned, the accomplished women; the women who could speak many languages, who could solve problems, and elucidate systems of philosophy? No: or if they have, they have also been women who were dignified with the majesty of moral greatness—women who regarded not themselves, their own feebleness, or their own susceptibility of pain, but who, endued with an almost superhuman energy, could trample under-foot every impediment that intervened between them and the accomplishment of some great object upon which their hopes were fixed, while that object was wholly unconnected with their own personal exaltation or enjoyment, and related only to some beloved object, whose suffering was their sorrow, whose good their gain.14

Conclusion 147

Ellis need not specify the economic implications of the majestic wife’s disinterest. Her conceptual groundwork laid by eighteenthcentury “heroines of romance and reality,” the disinterested mother and wife of the nineteenth century is clearly understood to be impervious to the pleasures of prosperity when abandoning “personal exaltation or enjoyment,” inviting suffering in the service of others’ needs, and abjecting herself before some “beloved object.” Her reward is posthumous, the tears of her survivors, who inherit her exalted ideals rather than her wealth. Ellis’ specification that such home-bound angels also eschew “many languages,” math, and systems of philosophy, however, suggests that, on the way to the Victorian period, the Heroine of Disinterest lost a few textbooks: In the eighteenth century, female disinterest still had some chance of dwelling with erudition, and education rather than essence was imagined to create propriety.

Notes Introduction 1. See Margot C. Finn, The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), for an exploration of personal debt and credit relations. On consumerism in the eighteenth century, see Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982); John Brewer and Roy Porter, Consumption and the World of Goods (London: Routledge, 1993); James Cruise, Governing Consumption: Needs and Wants, Suspended Characters, and the “Origins” of Eighteenth-Century English Novels (Lewisburg, Penn.: Bucknell University Press, 1999); Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping and Business in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997); and Lorna Weatherill, Consumer Behavior and Material Culture in Britain, 1660–1760 (London: Routledge, 1988). 2. John Brewer and Susan Staves, “Introduction,” Early Modern Conceptions of Property, eds Brewer and Staves (New York, London: Routledge, 1995), 1–18; 2, 6. 3. John Brewer and Susan Staves, 6. 4. Frances Ferguson, “Reading Morals: Locke and Rousseau on Education and Inequality,” Representations 6 (1984), 66–84; 66–67. 5. Robert Gordon, “Paradoxical Property,” in Early Modern Conceptions, 95–110; 99. 6. Michael McKeon, drawing upon Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 5–6, in “Historicizing Patriarchy: The Emergence of Gender Difference in England, 1660–1760,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 28 (Spring 1995), 295–322; 301. 7. McKeon, 306. 8. Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). 9. Armstrong, 59. 10. Helen Thompson, Ingenuous Subjection: Compliance and Power in the Eighteenth-Century Domestic Novel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 2–3. 11. Ruth Perry, Novel Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 46. See Anny Sadrin, Parentage and Inheritance in the Novels of Charles Dickens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 7, for a summary of the tendency of critics to dismiss the inheritance plot in the nineteenthcentury novel that applies to criticism of earlier fiction as well. 148

Notes 149

12. April London, Women and Property in the Eighteenth-Century English Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 3. 13. Donna Dickenson, Property, Women, and Politics: Subjects or Objects? (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 21. 14. Donna Dickenson, 18. 15. George Levine, Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 2. 16. Levine, 13, 8. 17. Levine, 8. 18. See H. J. Habakkuk, Marriage, Debt, and the Estates System: English Landownership 1650–1950 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 6–14, on those technical changes. 19. Habakkuk, 48. 20. Habakkuk, 76. 21. Habakkuk, 76. 22. Eileen Spring, Law, Land, and Family: Aristocratic Inheritance in England, 1330 to 1800 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 14–16. 23. Spring, 145. 24. Perry, 30. 25. Perry, 42. 26. Habakkuk, 146–68. 27. Habakkuk, 78. 28. Habakkuk, 22. 29. Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 5. 30. J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 389. Scholars have disputed the prominence of civic humanism in the early modern period. What is undoubted, however, is the anxiety about the changing relations between who people were and what they owned, a debate into which writers such as Harrington entered fiercely. 31. Pocock, 451. 32. After citing a flurry of late seventeenth and early eighteenth century references, the OED provides three quotations that use propriety in the sense of physical property, from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. All three are clearly deploying the stilted legal language of an earlier time: 1889 Athenæum 3 Aug. 157/1. The lately established propriety of Nova Scotia was to be ceded to that power [sc. France]. 1894 Nation (NY) 19 July 51/1 Early in 1774 he removed to Lenox, Mass., was at once elected clerk of that ‘Propriety’, and was sent as its delegate to the General Court of the Colony. 1939 C. MCLAUGHLIN GREEN Holyoke, Massachusetts: Case Hist. 4. In 1685 with the establishment of the Dominion of New England Springfield voted to lay the commons out into proprieties and to allot individual holdings.

150

Notes

33. See Sean Gaston, Derrida and Disinterest (London, New York: Continuum, 2005), vii, for a summary. 34. Pierre Bourdieu, Practical Reason: On the Theory of Action (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 89. 35. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Specificity of the Scientific Field and the Social Conditions of the Progress of Reason,” Social Science Information (1972), 19–47; 26. Qtd. in Bruce Curtis, “Reworking Moral Regulation: Metaphorical Capital and the Field of Disinterest,” Canadian Journal of Sociology/Cahiers Canadiens de Sociologie 22 (1997), 303–18; 315. 36. Levine, 271, 8. 37. Levine, 10. 38. Levine, 271. 39. Levine, 10. 40. Amelia Anderson, The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 6. 41. See Claudia Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s: Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), on the loss of faith in filial piety. On the change in attitude toward educational possibilities from optimism to alarm, see Julia Douthwaite, The Wild Girl, Natural Man, and the Monster: Dangerous Experiments in the Age of Enlightenment (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 4. 42. Sir William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England. 4 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1765–69), Book 2, Ch. 4. Further references to this text will be provided parenthetically according to book and chapter. 43. Mary Hays, The Victim of Prejudice, ed. Eleanor Ty (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 1998), 6. Subsequent references to this work will be provided parenthetically in the text. 44. Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, ed. Bonamy Dobree (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 282. Further references to this work will be made parenthetically within the text. 45. Sadrin, 11. She describes the plot of the recovered bequest as almost exclusively male in the period’s fiction. 46. Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 346.

1

Feminizing Disinterest

1. Samuel Richardson, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, eds. Thomas Keymer and Alice Wakley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 81. Future references to this novel will be made parenthetically within the text. 2. Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote; or, the Adventures of Arabella (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 66.

Notes 151

3. The restored inheritance provides a tidy and consequently disappointing resolution to compelling narratives of female difficulties, considerably undercutting the radical implications of the plots, Susan Staves argues, noting that the peculiarity of Evelina’s birth exposes her to the psychological and physical violence women faced in a patriarchal society, but suggesting that the critique is considerably undermined by the “romance” ending, “Evelina; or, Female Difficulties,” Modern Philology 73 (1976), 368–81. Katharine Rogers attributes the convention to female authors’ confinement within strict rules of propriety. The authors are “forced into melodrama” because realistic misfortunes might implicate the heroine herself. “Since the heroine must have the birth and refinement of a lady … and at the same time be eligible for pity and melodramatic adventures … the circumstances of her birth were usually peculiar,” but ideally resolved by story’s end, “Inhibitions on Eighteenth-Century Women Novelists: Elizabeth Inchbald and Charlotte Smith,” EighteenthCentury Studies 11 (1977), 63–78. 4. Ruth Perry, Novel Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 46. 5. James Thompson, Models of Value: Eighteenth-Century Political Economy and the Novel (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), 159. 6. James Thompson, 152–3. 7. James Thompson, 152. 8. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 174. 9. Nancy Pell, “Resistance, Rebellion, and Marriage: The Economics of Jane Eyre,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 31 (1977), 397–420, 417. See also Jina Politi, “Jane Eyre Class-ified,” Literature and History 8 (1982), 56–66. 10. Parama Roy, “Unaccommodated Women and the Poetics of Property in Jane Eyre,” Studies in English Literature 29 (1989), 713–27; 715. 11. Cynthia Klekar, “‘Her Gift was Compelled’: Gender and the Failure of the ‘Gift’ in Cecilia,” ECF 18 (2005), 291–306, 126. 12. Rachel Brownstein, “Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, and Pride and Prejudice,” in The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, eds. Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 32–57, 53. 13. J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 451. 14. Gentleman Bred in his Family, The History and Life of Robert Blake (London: J. Millan and R. Davis [1740?]), 115; 112. 15. Richard Steele, The Englishman (London: Ferd. Burleigh, 1714), 9–10. Steele 2. Summarizing and responding to attacks upon his character by The Examiner, Steele quotes at length an essay entitled “Toby’s Character of Mr. St –le,” 9–10. 16. Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 9, 19.

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Notes

17. Qtd. in Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 31. 18. Qtd. in Hirschman, 25–6. 19. Hirschman, 42. 20. See Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York: New York University Press, 1984), 31. 21. Scott Paul Gordon, The Power of the Passive Self in English Literature, 1640–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1. 22. La Rochefoucauld, Francois de. Oeuvres. Paris: Hachette, 1923. 23. Madame de Pompadour, Advice to a Female Friend (London, 1750), 47. Based on information from English Short Title Catalogue. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gale Group. http://galenet.galegroup.com. proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu/servlet/ECCO 24. Qtd. in Hirschman, 50. 25. Qtd. in McKeon, 20. 26. Sean Gaston, “Derrida and the Ruins of Disinterest.” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 7 (2002), 105–18, 107. 27. McKeon, 342. 28. McKeon traces the division between public and private to Locke’s rejection of the feudal analogy between politics and the household, which opened up a space between the domestic and the political. The early modern capitalist revolution contributed to this detachment by removing productive labor from the household, thereby enhancing the oppositional relationship newly conceived between the domestic and the economic realms that created a new sense of marriages of alliance as dubious invasions of the political into the personal. Meanwhile, the abolition of feudal tenures and the Court of Wards in 1646 sharpened the distinction between feudal and capitalist concepts of property. Feudal traditions of English common law deemed all property to be held in fee from one’s lord and ultimately the king—a limited and conditional use-right rather than the “sole and despotic dominion” that William Blackstone describes as universal, even as he historicizes it as a convenience rather than an inevitability, Commentaries, Book II, Chapter 1, p. 2. Whereas property relations had long been a mixture of the feudal and the capitalist, accelerating economic change, as well as political transformations, created a new sense of modern property rights as heroically individualistic. 29. McKeon, 343. 30. Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 99. 31. McKeon, 346. 32. Gaston, 113. 33. Jean Grimshaw, “The Idea of a Female Ethic,” Philosophy East & West 42 (1992), 221–37, 221. 34. Geraint Parry, “Émile: Learning to Be Men, Women, and Citizens,” in The Cambridge Companion to Rousseau, ed. Patrick Riley (Cambridge: Cambridge

Notes 153

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50.

51.

University Press, 2001), 261. Parry also makes the point about Rousseau’s conventionality. Carol Rose, Property and Persuasion: Essays on the History, Theory, and Rhetoric of Ownership (Boulder, Co.: Westview Press, 1994). Appleby, 31. Rose, 37. Rose, 40–1. George Levine, Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 2. Levine, 2. Terry Eagleton, The Function of Criticism (London: Verso, 1990), 16. Charlotte Smith, Emmeline: The Orphan of the Castle, ed. Anne Henry Ehrenpreis (London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 527. Future references to this novel will be provided parenthetically within the text. Eliza Parsons, Lucy, Vol. 3 (London: H. Woodfall, 1794), 255–6. Elizabeth Bonhote, Olivia; or Deserted Bride, Vol. III (London: W. Lane, 1787), 85. Future references to this novel will be provided parenthetically within the text. On this democratization, see McKeon, Secret History, 385–7. McKeon, 346–7. McKeon, 10. Dickenson, 35. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Men and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Sylvana Tomaselli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 125. Wesley Hohfeld introduced the notion of property as composed of claims and obligations between people, a notion other scholars took up, in “Fundamental Legal Conceptions as Applied in Judicial Reasoning,” 1913 (London: Greenfield Press, 1978). The notion of property as a collection of privileged rights to exclude, use and transfer property has been greatly influenced by A. M. Honoré. For a discussion of current conceptualizations of property, including the “bundle of sticks” theory, see Abraham Bell and Gideon Pachomovsky, “A Theory of Property,” Cornell Law Review 30 (March 2005), 531–615. See Thomas Grey also for a famous refutation of this dematerialization of property, “The Disintegration of Property,” in Modern Understandings of Liberty and Property, ed. Richard A. Epstein (New York: Garland 2000). Testamentary disposition has long been considered a crucial feature of private property systems, the alienability of the property itself testifying to its absolute ownership, “a corollary to the idea of ‘exclusive ownership’ which has come to dominate theoretical understandings of property in Britain,” Alastair Owens and Jon Stobart, “Introduction,” in Urban Fortunes: Property and Inheritance in the Town, eds. Stobart and Owens (Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2000), 15–16. On the paradox of possession as confirmed by the ability to transfer the property in Burney’s work, see Irene Tucker, “Writing Home: Evelina, The Epistolary Novel and the Paradox of Property,” ELH 60 (Summer 1993), 419–39.

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52. Rose, 18. 53. “Independence I have long considered as the grand blessing of life, the basis of every virtue—and independence I will ever secure by contracting my wants, though I were to live on a barren heath,” writes Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Dedication, 67. 54. I am adopting Abraham Bell’s paraphrasing: “The Blackstonian bundle presupposes impeccably demarcated parcels whose boundaries extend upward to the heavens and downward to the depths of the earth, and bestows upon owners unbridled powers and privileges to use, transfer, and even abuse land,” (543).

2 Burney’s Heroines of Disinterest 1. For a description of Evelina as a fairy tale, particularly in its depiction of Lord Orville, see, for example, Lillian and Edward A. Bloom, “Fanny Burney’s Novels: The Retreat from Wonder,” Novel 12 (1979), 215–35, and Judith Lowder Newton, Women, Power, and Subversion: Social Strategies in British Fiction, 1778–1860 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1981), 39–41. Gerald A. Barker is among those who describe Orville as “young Fanny’s wish fulfillment of the ideal male lover,” Grandison’s Heirs: The Paragon’s Progress in the Late Eighteenth-Century English Novel (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), 71. 2. Frances Burney, Evelina, ed. Edward A. Bloom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 20. Future references to this work will be given parenthetically within the text. 3. John Locke, Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. Ian Shapiro (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), Section 29,112. Future references to this text will be provided parenthetically, by section. 4. Even Blackstone admits the right to dictate the descent of property after death is conventional rather than defensible: “The most universal and effectual way, of abandoning property, is by the death of the occupant; when, both the actual possession and intention of keeping possession ceasing, the property, which is founded upon such possession and intention, ought also to cease of course. For, naturally speaking, the instant a man ceases to be, he ceases to have any dominion: else, if he had a right to dispose of his acquisitions one moment beyond his life, he would also have a right to direct their disposal for a million of ages after him; which would be highly absurd and inconvenient. All property must therefore cease upon death, considering men as absolute individuals, and unconnected with civil society: for then, by the principles before established, the next immediate occupant would acquire a right in all that the deceased possessed,” Book 2, Ch. 2. 5. Ruth Perry, Novel Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 214. 6. OED provides a noun, adjective, and verb for tender, all of which can be applied to traditional parental obligations: Parents are tender in the sense of “careful of the welfare of; careful to preserve from harm or injury;

Notes 155

7. 8. 9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

considerate of, thoughtful for; fond of,” s.v. “tender.” Accordingly, they tender provisions, “an offer of money, or the like, in discharge of a debt or liability, esp. an offer which thus fulfils the terms of the law and of the liability.” They also provide tender, “money or other things that may be legally tendered or offered in payment; currency prescribed by law as that in which payment may be made.” Thomas Gisborne, An Enquiry Into the Duties of the Female Sex, 1797 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1996), 362. James Fordyce, Sermons for Young Women, 1766 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1996), 35. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1757, ed. J. T. Boulton (London: Routledge, 1958), 42–3. Hester Chapone, Letters on the Improvement of the Mind, 1773 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 1996), 71. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759, eds. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976), 190–1; IV: ii: 10. Gisborne, 14, 36. Gisborne, 23. Fordyce, 9. Fordyce, 75. Jean-Jaques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 359. Rousseau, 359. Fordyce, 33–4. Fordyce, 122. Fordyce, 142. Fordyce, 95. Fordyce, 101. Henry Home Kames, Essays Upon Several Subjects Concerning British Antiquities (Edinburgh, 1747). The phrase is Kames’ description of the position of feudal landholders, whose continual personal service ensures their use, but not freehold proprietorship, of land. On will making as the marker of a “mercantile” mentality, see H. J. Habakkuk, Marriage, Debt, and the Estates System: English Landownership 1650–1950 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 4–5. The phrase is from J. Z. Titow, “Some Differences Between Manors and Their Effects on the Condition of the Peasant in the Thirteenth Century,” Agricultural History Review 10 (1962), 7. Providing nourishment and education, not “the bare act of begetting,” sets up the affective exchange, Locke insists; when the children’s father “quits his care of them, he loses his power over them, which goes along with their nourishment and education, to which it is inseparably annexed; and it belongs as much to the foster-father of an exposed child, as to the natural father of another” (Section 65). Julia Epstein, The Iron Pen: Frances Burney and the Politics of Women’s Writing (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 98.

156

Notes

28. Frances Hutcheson, An Inquiry into the Original of Our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (London: J. Darby, for Will. and John Smith in Dublin, 1725), 124. Italics in the original. 29. Qtd. in Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority, 1750–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 215. 30. Henry Home Kames, Elements of Criticism, Vol. 1 (Edinburgh: John Bell and William Creek; London: T. Cadell and G. Robinson, 1785), 61–2. 31. John Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education, eds. John W. and Jean S. Yolton (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), Section 110. Subsequent references to this text will be given parenthetically by section number. 32. Susan Fraiman, Unbecoming Women: British Women Writers and the Novel of Development (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 53. 33. Habakkuk, 138. 34. Spring, 172. 35. Edward Copeland, Women Writing About Money: Women’s Fiction in England, 1790–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 23, 32. 36. Susan Staves, Married Women’s Separate Property, 95. Evelina would likely receive that amount per year as a widow if her marriage settlements followed the standard ratio of £100 per annum per £1,000 in portion, Habakkuk, 147. 37. Habakkuk, 133–4; Spring, 83–7. 38. Habakkuk, 121–6. 39. Habakkuk, 53. 40. Habakkuk, 147. 41. See John Gregory, A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters (1774), vol. 1 of Female Education in the Age of Enlightenment, ed. Janet Todd (Brookfield, Vt.: Pickering and Chatto, 1996). Eliza Haywood’s Betsy Thoughtless also recognizes the psychological importance of financial independence when coming into marriage. 42. Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, eds. W. J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss, vol. 3 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969), 208. 43. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (New York: Knopf, 1984), 23. 44. Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: Gender, Property, and the Rise of the Novel (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 235. Gallagher contends that this “ethical transcendental subject” is “hard to distinguish from Nobody.” Margaret Anne Doody also notes the scenes in which she envisions her philanthropy, Frances Burney: A Life in the Works (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 117–8. 45. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 334. 46. On the “Enlightenment selfhood” construed out of Lockean notions of memory, see Doody, “‘A Good Memory is Unpardonable’: Self, Love, and the Irrational Irritation of Memory,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 14 (2001), 67–95.

Notes 157

47. Qtd in Doody, 145. 48. John Balguy, Letters to a Deist (London, 1732), 8.

3 Strategic Disavowals in A Simple Story 1. For a summary of early reviews that objected to the clumsiness of the transition between the two stories and to the ending, see Allison Conway, Private Interests: Women, Portraiture, and the Visual Culture of the English Novel, 1709–1790 (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 2001). Roger Manvell claims the ending was “no doubt inserted on the advice of Godwin or Holcroft,” but provides no evidence, Elizabeth Inchbald: England’s Principal Woman Dramatist and Independent Woman of Letters in 18th Century London: a Biographical Study (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1987). On the debate over whether the first half was written much earlier, see Jane Spencer’s introduction to A Simple Story, ed. J. M. S. Tompkins (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), x–xi, and Terry Castle’s summary of critics’ views, Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 321. 2. Terry Castle, 320, 323, 325. Castle’s assessment admits the difficulties, given the brief and dizzying transition between the two women’s stories, of considering the work “a plausible, logically consistent work of art” but insists upon the aesthetic power of the second half (“Inchbald at her most self-consciously sublime”) and rejects the idea that it is reactionary conservatism. Matilda, she argues, is Miss Milner revived from the dead, a “phantasmic substitution,” and in both stories, “patriarchal violence is quelled, and feminine delight made paramount.” 3. Diane Osland, “Heart-Picking in A Simple Story,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 16 (October 2003), 80. 4. Castle, 322, argues that the first name of the initial heroine is never given and may well be the same as the daughter’s. 5. Alan Richardson, Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780–1832 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 204. 6. Elizabeth Inchbald, A Simple Story, ed. J. M. S. Tompkins (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 338. Future references to this text will be included parenthetically. 7. The description of London is from David Green, “Independent Women, Wealth and Wills in Nineteenth-Century London,”Urban Fortunes: Property and Inheritance in the Town, 1700–1900, eds. Jon Stobart and Alastair Owens (Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2000), 221. See Stobart and Owens’ introduction to Urban Fortunes for more on London as a site of consumerism and modern property relations. Castle, among others, praises the “emotional exactitude” of Inchbald’s portraiture, 321. 8. Radcliffe is centrally concerned with “the topos of the imprisoned woman deprived of her property rights,” Alison Milbank argues, “Introduction,” A Sicilian Romance, ed. Milbank (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). For

158

9. 10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

17. 18. 19.

20.

21. 22.

23.

Notes

another reading of the Gothic’s concern with women’s property rights, see E. J. Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Clery, 21. Jane Spencer, The Rise of the Woman Novelist: From Aphra Behn to Jane Austen (New York: Blackwell, 1986), 160; Anna Lott, “Sexual Politics in Elizabeth Inchbald,” Studies in English Literature 34 (1994), 635–49. Gerald A. Barker, Grandison’s Heirs: The Paragon’s Progress in the Late Eighteenth-Century English Novel (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1985), 98; Paula Byrne, “A Simple Story: From Inchbald to Austen,” Romanticism 5 (1999), 161–72. Peter Mortensen, “Rousseau’s English Daughters: Female Desire and Male Guardianship in British Romantic Fiction,” English Studies 83 (2002), 356–70. Jo Alyson Parker also considers the “narrative bridge” as well as Matilda’s characterization a failure, “Complicating A Simple Story: Inchbald’s Two Versions of Female Power,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 30 (1997), 265. On the Gothic nature of A Simple Story, see Patricia Meyer Spacks, Desire and Truth: Functions of Plot in Eighteenth-Century English Novels (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 195–201; Candace Ward, “Inordinate Desire: Schooling the Senses in Elizabeth Inchbald’s A Simple Story,” Studies in the Novel 31 (1999), 1–18; and George E. Haggerty, “Female Abjection in Inchbald’s A Simple Story,” Studies in English Literature 1500– 1900 36 (1996), 655–82. For a summary of traditional readings of the Gothic, see Robert Miles, Gothic Writing, 1750–1820: A Genealogy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 1–9. Clery, 114, 126. Margot Gayle Backus, The Gothic Family Romance: Heterosexuality, Child Sacrifice, and the Anglo-Irish Colonial Order (Durham, North Carolina, London: Duke University Press, 1999), 15. Miles, Gothic Writing, 3. Clery, 126–7. On the 1790s, see Robert Miles, “The 1790s: The Effulgence of Gothic,” in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, ed. Jerrold E. Hogle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 41–62. The phrase is drawn from Miles’ description of the seventeenth century as the Gothic cusp, a transitional period between medieval and Enlightenment society, in Ann Radcliffe: The Great Enchantress (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 114. Haggerty, 657. The phrase about justice is from Evelina. The description of Gothic homes as real estate is from Lauren Fitzgerald, “(In)Alienable Rights: Property, Feminism, and the Female Body from Ann Radcliffe to the Alien Films,” Romanticism on the Net 21 (2001). Castle, among other critics, claims the concluding words call attention to the book’s lack of “any prescriptive rendering of female socialization,” (293).

Notes 159

24. 25.

26.

27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

To Gary Kelly, the novel’s concluding passage is a pro forma attempt to smother the book’s daring by reference to the eighteenth-century’s favorite solution to female flaws (education), The English Jacobin Novel 1780–1805 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976). Caroline Breashears dismisses with female pedagogy entirely, contending that it is Dorriforth’s education in both Christian principles and masculine ideals that produces the central conflict of the story, “Defining Masculinity in A Simple Story,” Eighteenth Century Fiction, 16 (2004), 468. Even Osland, more sympathetic to Inchbald’s alleged aesthetic failings, refers to the “proper education” theme as only the “ostensible moral of the tale,” 98. H. J. Habakkuk, Marriage, Debt, and the Estates System: English Landownership 1650–1950 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 34. On the changing attitude toward wills, see Jack Goody, “Introduction”, Family and Inheritance: Rural Society in Western Europe, 1200–1800, eds. Goody, Joan Thirsk, and E. P. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 16–17. To preserve and magnify great estates, aristocrats favored primogeniture over partible inheritance and consequently usually settlements and legal succession over wills, according to Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (London: Hutchinson Education, 1987), 206. See R. F. Foster on the British rejection of partible inheritance, Modern Ireland: 1600–1972 (New York: Penguin, 1989), 26. Leaving significant amounts of property to a daughter under a will was the hallmark of “bourgeois ideals of inheritance,” bespeaking an unaristocratic concern for the individual child over the estate as well as a predilection for mobile wealth, says Habakkuk, 35. Mary Davys, The Reform’d Coquet (London: H. Woodfall, 1724), 9. Aphra Behn, The Fair Jilt in All the Histories and Novels Written by the Late Mrs. Behn, 5th edn (London: R. Wellington, 1705), 148. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. C. B. MacPherson. (New York: Penguin 1982), Ch. 15. As Jean Jacquette noted of Hobbesian political theory, “the self-assessment of subjects conditions the means by which they can be ruled,” “Contract and Coercion: Power and Gender in Leviathan,” in Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition, ed. Hilda L. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 200–19. Jean-Jaques Rousseau, Emile, or On Education, trans. Allan Bloom. (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 91. Frances Ferguson, “Reading Morals: Locke and Rousseau on Education and Inequality,” Representations 6 (1984), 68. Ferguson, 66–7. Spacks, 134. She hopes that Matilda’s helplessness will increase the father’s feelings of lordly obligation, as the narrator suggests with yet more hedging: “But, perhaps, in this implicit submission to her lordship, there was a distant hope that the necessitous situation of his daughter might plead more forcibly than his parental love; and that knowing her abandoned of every support but through himself, that idea might form some

160

35. 36.

37.

38. 39.

4

Notes

little tie between them; and be at least a token of the relationship,” Inchbald, 203. See Susan Staves, Married Women’s Separate Property in England, 1660–1833 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 148. Alastair Owens, “Property, Will Making and Estate Disposal in an Industrial Town, 1800–1857,” in Urban Fortunes: Property and Inheritance in the Town, eds. Stobart and Owens (Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate, 2000), 90. David Green notes that women in London were more likely to leave wills, indicating that they either were not married or had found a way through separate estates to partly defy the civil death of marriage, 204. Miles, 61. I am drawing on Clery, who suggests in The Rise of Supernatural Fiction that the first modern ghost is a woman because of coverture’s unnatural erasure of women’s property rights: “The law itself engenders the supernatural; women are the ghosts in its machine,” 126.

Gothic Properties

1. E. J. Clery, “Introduction,” in Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto, ed. W. S. Lewis (Oxford, 1996), xxx. Clery notes that critics going back to Montague Summers describe the castle as the protagonist of the Gothic novel, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 73. In her introduction to Otranto, she also calls it the main protagonist of the novel, xv. 2. Qtd in Clery, Otranto, xxxii. 3. Tim Dolin, Mistress of the House: Women of Property in the Victorian Novel (Brookfield, Vermont: Ashgate Press, 1997), 8. 4. See E. J. Clery, The Rise of Supernatural Fiction, 1762–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 73, on the aristocratic ideology of modern times as represented in Otranto. 5. On this point, see Larry Wolff, “When I Imagine a Child: The Idea of Childhood and the Philosophy of Memory in the Enlightenment,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 31 (1998), 377–401. 6. Another claim often made is that conceptions of character moved from being defined as static to dynamic. See Christopher Fox, Locke and the Scriblerians: Identity and Consciousness in Eighteenth-Century Britain (California, 1988), 18, and James Thompson, Beyond Self and World: The Novels of Jane Austen (Pennsylvania State, 1988), 108. 7. John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 335. 8. Margaret Anne Doody, “‘A Good Memory Is Unpardonable’: Self, Love, and the Irrational Irritation of Memory,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 14 (Oct. 2001), 67–94, 68. 9. Frances Ferguson, “Romantic Memory,” in The Wordsworthian Enlightenment: Romantic Poetry and the Ecology of Reading: Essays in Honor of Geoffrey Hartman, eds. Helen Regueiro Elam and Frances Ferguson (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 72.

Notes 161

10. Wolff, 393. 11. Karen I. Vaughn makes this claim in “Locke and the Labor Theory of Value,” Journal of Libertarian Studies 2 (1978), 311–26, 313. 12. Ferguson, 73–4. 13. Ferguson, 75. 14. Ferguson, 73. 15. Anthony Ashley Cooper Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 173. 16. Karen Valihora, “The Judgement of Judgement: Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments,” British Journal of Aesthetics 41 (April 2001), 138–51, 140. 17. Ann Radcliffe, The Italian or the Confessional of the Black Penitents: A Romance, ed. Robert Miles (London: Penguin Press, 2000), 266. Future references to this novel will be provided parenthetically within the text. 18. Kate Ellis, for example, compares St. Aubert to the “God of Genesis” in his offering of wisdom coupled with forbidden zones, The Contested Castle: Gothic Novels and the Subversion of Domestic Ideology (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989). Miles similarly claims the restraint of sensibility as Emily’s primary task, Gothic Writing, 1750–1820: A Genealogy (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 69. Mary Poovey makes a similar presumption in arguing that Emily’s sensibility makes her vulnerable outside La Vallee, “Ideology and ‘The Mysteries of Udolpho,’” Criticism 21 (1979), 307–30. 19. Miles, Gothic Writing, 87. 20. Clery, Rise, 133. 21. The Old English Baron, ed. James Trainer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 37. All subsequent references to the Old English Baron will be to this edition. Wuthering Heights (1847) is primarily Nelly Dean’s recollection of two generations of power plays fought through property—although, crucially, reconciliation comes not through property but through personality. Nelly educates the shallow Lockwood on a family he visits but does not join. Alison Milbank calls Wuthering Heights the least Gothic of the Brontë novels because of property’s diminished power: “her text involves no final struggle for ownership of the Heights, which quickly loses its unhappy associations,” Daughters of the House: Modes of Gothic in Victorian Fiction (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 14. 22. On this point, see, for example, Beth Kowaleski-Wallace, “Home Economics: Domestic Ideology in Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda,” The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation 29 (1988), 242–62, which discusses the transition from the old-fashioned patriarch to the new-style version appealing to cooperation. 23. See Claudia Johnson for a discussion of the death of filial piety in the 1790s novel, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s: Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 24. Miles, Genealogy, 36.

162

Notes

25. Alan Richardson, Literature, Education, and Romanticism: Reading as Social Practice, 1780–1832 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 204. 26. “Ideology and The Mysteries of Udolpho,” 323. 27. George Haggerty, Unnatural Affections: Women and Fiction in the Later Eighteenth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 13. 28. Rictor Norton, Mistress of Udolpho: The Life of Ann Radcliffe (London; New York: Leicester University Press, 1999). 29. See Amy Stanley for a description of possessive individualism as individuals’ assumption of being inherently propertied, “sovereigns of themselves, possessive individuals entitled to their own persons, labor, and faculties,” From Bondage to Contract: Wage Labor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 30. Margot Gayle Backus, The Gothic Family Romance: Heterosexuality, Child Sacrifice, and the Anglo-Irish Colonial Order (Durham, North Carolina, London: Duke University Press, 1999), 122.

5 Property Recollected in Tranquility 1. William Godwin, “Preface by the Author,” in Things as They are or The Adventures of Caleb Williams, ed. Maurice Hindle (New York: Penguin, 2006), 3. 2. Mary Wollstonecraft, “Author’s Preface,” Maria, ed. Janet Todd (New York: Penguin, 2004), 59; Godwin, “Preface,” 3. 3. For important discussions of the radical novelists’ use of contract, see Nancy Johnson, The English Jacobin Novel on Rights, Property and the Law: Critiquing the Contract (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) and Peter Howell, “Godwin, Contractarianism, and the Political Dead End of Empire,” Eighteenth-Century Life 28 (2004), 61–86, 80. 4. Pamela Clemit, Jon Klancher, and Gary Kelly are among those who have argued for the political nature of the critique of narrative in Godwin. Clemit, The Godwinian Novel: The Rational Fictions of Godwin, Brockden Brown, Mary Shelley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993); Klancher, “Godwin and the Genre Reformers; On Necessity and Contingency in Romantic Narrative Theory,” in Romanticism, History, and the Possibilities of Genre: Reforming Literature, 1789–1837, eds. Tilottama Rajan and Julia M. Wright (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 21–38; Gary Kelly, The English Jacobin Novel, 1780–1805 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976). Also see Nancy Johnson, 12–24, and Gavin Edwards, Narrative Order, 1789–1819: Life and Story in the Age of Revolution (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 14–15. Evan Radcliffe, “Godwin from ‘Metaphysician’ to Novelist: Political Justice, Caleb Williams, and the Tension Between Philosophical Argumentation and Narrative,” sees the novel as an exploration of the problems in “constructing and assessing narratives” that the Enquiry’s philosophical argumentation avoids, Modern Philology 97 (2000), 529. Kelly makes a similar argument, 41. Many scholars have explored the implications of the doubled narration

Notes 163

5. 6.

7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16.

17.

18. 19.

in Godwin as well as the tendency in Jacobin novels to include parallel and inset narrations. See Gerald Barker’s “The Narrative Mode of Caleb Williams: Problems and Resolutions,” Studies in the Novel 25 (1993), 1–15, on the various “narrating selves” of Caleb Williams. See also Jerrold Hogle, “The Texture of the Self in Godwin’s Things as They Are,” Boundary 7 (1979), 261–82, 269; Elaine M. Ayers, “Repeating ‘A Half-Told and Mangled Tale’: Reading Caleb Williams Through Emily Melville,” English Language Notes 42 (2005), 24–43; and Donald Wehrs, “Rhetoric, History, Rebellion: Caleb Williams and the Subversion of Eighteenth-Century Fiction,” Studies in English Literature 28 (1988), 497–511. Miles, “What Is a Romantic Novel?” Novel 34 (Spring 2001), 180–201; 186. Claudia Johnson, Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s: Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 3. Secresy; or, The Ruin on the Rock, ed. Isobel Grundy (Peterborough, Ont., 1998), 157. Future references to this work will be provided parenthetically within the text. Hogle, 269. For a rare consideration of Emily Melville’s importance to Godwin’s larger themes, see Ayers. Wehrs, 500. Ferguson, “Romantic Memory,” in The Wordsworthian Enlightenment: Romantic Poetry and the Ecology of Reading: Essays in Honor of Geoffrey Hartman, eds. Helen Regueiro Elam and Frances Ferguson (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 72–3. Ferguson, “Romantic Memory,” 73. Sheldon Wolin, “Contract and Birthright,” Political Theory 14 (1986), 179–93, 180. Wolin, 180. See Nancy Johnson, “Introduction,” for a discussion of the ways in which self-possession was dependent, in the Lockean tradition, on economic independence and the Jacobins’ modification of contractarianism to enfranchise women and lower-class men, 1–11. William Godwin, “Of History and Romance,” reprinted in Hindle, 372. Godwin described having “a vein of thinking that was properly my own” in writing Caleb Williams, “Godwin’s Account of the Composition of Caleb Williams,” Things as They Are or the Adventures of Caleb Williams, ed. Maurice Hindle (New York, Penguin, 2006), 351. On fiction-making as an attempt to bring meaning to flux, see Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968). James Olney, Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 417. See Barker on the various “narrating selves” of Caleb Williams. See Christopher Salvesen on how memory can offer a “double existence” of past as well as present selves, The Landscape of Memory: A Study of Wordsworth’s Poetry (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 179,

164

20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

26.

27. 28. 29. 30.

Notes

and a discussion of the tension between remembered experience and the desire to escape it, 185. Edwards, 9. David Hume, The Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Ernest C. Mossner (London: Penguin Books, 1969), 306–8. See Shelley Taylor, Positive Illusions: Creative Self-Deception and the Healthy Mind (New York: Basic Books, 1989), 32. Ferguson, 84. See Daniel Schacter, The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), for information on the research on mood-congruent retrieval and retrospective bias. See also Michael Ross and Michael Conway, “Remembering One’s Own Past: The Construction of Personal Histories,” in Handbook of Motivation and Cognition: Foundations of Social Behavior, eds. Richard M. Sorrentino and E. Tory Higgins (New York: Guilford Press, 1986), 133–4; Gordon H. Bower, “How Might Emotions Affect Learning?” in The Handbook of Emotion and Memory: Research and Theory (Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum Associations, 1992), 3–31, 12, 20–2; Jefferson A. Singer and Peter Salovey, The Remembered Self: Emotion and Memory in Personality (New York: Free Press, 1993), 13–37; and Schacter, Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past (New York: Harper Collins 1997), 211–2. On people’s tendency to perceive, elicit, and remember experiences that confirm their self-concepts, see Ross and Conway; and William B. Swann Jr. and Stephen J. Read, “Self-Verification Processes: How We Sustain Our Self-Conceptions,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 17 (1981), 351–70. The term comes up six times, three times in reference to Falkland’s education, twice in reference to Emily Melville. The last use of the verb is Caleb’s, in the penultimate paragraph of the text, in which he seeks to render Falkland blameless. Crucially, his lack of culpability in Caleb’s estimation derives precisely from his lack of control over what he has “imbibed” in his youth. Caleb so thoroughly imbibes Falkland’s story, some critics argue, that his own tale “repeats Falkland’s ‘story’ unawares,” Wehrs, 507. Robert Uphaus gives him more agency and describes his intent as violent: “Caleb wishes to reenact and thereby appropriate Falkland’s story to his own consciousness,” “‘Caleb Williams’: Godwin’s Epoch of Mind,” Studies in the Novel 9 (1977), 279–96, 279. Andrew Scheiber finds him more culpable, claiming Falkland as “Caleb’s ultimate victim,” “Falkland’s Story: Caleb Williams’ Other Voice,” Studies in the Novel 17 (1985), 255–66. Ferguson, 87. The phrase is from Godwin’s account of the composition of the novel, reprinted as Appendix II in Caleb Williams, 350. Carol Rose, “Propter Honoris Respectum: Property as the Keystone Right?” 71, Notre Dame Law Review 329 (1996). William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, ed. Isaac Kramnick (London: Penguin, 1976), Book 8, Ch. 1.

Notes 165

31. Ibid. 32. Anna Laetitia Barbauld, The Works of Anna Lætitia Barbauld, with a Memoir by Lucy Aikin, Vol. II (London: Longman, 1825), 305–20; 307–8. 33. Godwin, Enquiry, Book 8, Ch. 1. 34. We are told that the nabob wakes every morning fearing discovery about how he achieved his wealth in India. “A sudden turn of his head, perchance, discovers his shadow on the wall. Legions of threatening phantoms then crowd upon his apprehension; and the evening, yet more miserable than the day, concludes with an opiate, administered to lull the feeble body into lethargy, and hush the perturbed conscience into silence” (67). 35. Godwin, Enquiry, Book 8, Ch. 1.

Conclusion: Austenian Disinterest 1. Michael McKeon, The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 342. 2. Thomas Nagel, The View From Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 3. George Levine, Dying to Know: Scientific Epistemology and Narrative in Victorian Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002),14. 4. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, ed. James Kinsley (New York: Penguin Classics, 2002), 19. All future references to the text will be cited parenthetically. 5. Rachel Brownstein, “Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, and Pride and Prejudice,” in The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen, eds. Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 54–5. 6. Amanda Anderson, The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 32–3, 4. 7. Anderson, 4. 8. Jane Austen, Persuasion (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2004), 38. All future references to the text will be cited parenthetically. 9. Sir Walter Scott, Quarterly Review 14 (October 1815), 188–201. 10. Karen Newman, “Can This Marriage Be Saved: Jane Austen Makes Sense of an Ending,” ELH 50: 4 (1983), 693–710; 698. 11. Brownstein, 32–57; 53. 12. Brownstein, 35. 13. In this instance, McKeon is analyzing Robert Hooke’s theory of scientific disinterestedness, 348. 14. Sarah Stickney Ellis, The Women of England, Their Social Duties, and Domestic Habits (London: Fisher, Son & Co., 1839), 64.

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Index Addison, Joseph, 26 Affective economy, 5–6, 12, 17, 39–49, 54–58, 65, 68, 71–72, 76–77, 83–84, 92, 102, 117 In A Simple Story, 65, 68, 71–72, 76–79, 83–84 In Evelina, 39–49, 54–57 In Gothic novel, 92, 102, 109, 114–15 Anderson, Amanda, 14–15, 142, 146 Appleby, Joyce, 27 Arabian Nights, 135 Armstrong, Nancy, 3 Austen, Jane, 10, 19, 19, 21–22, 32, 38, 55, 96, 111, 131, 137, 139–46 Disinterest in, 19, 140–46 And estate settlements, 10 Northanger Abbey, 111, 131 Persuasion, 19, 140–41, 143 Pride and Prejudice, 10, 19, 22, 137, 140–46 Backus, Margot, 70 Barbauld, Anna, 136–37 “On Education,” 136–37 Barker, Gerald, 69 Behn, Aphra, 75 The Fair Jilt, 75 Bennett, Agnes Maria, 30 Anna; or Memoirs of a Welsh Heiress, 30 Blackstone, William, 15–16, 38, 63, 85, 91–92, 107, 111–12, 114 Bonhote, Elizabeth, 30–31 Olivia, 30–31 Bourdieu, Pierre, 13 Brewer, John, 1–3, 6 Bronte, Charlotte, 22 Jane Eyre, 22, 138 Brownstein, Rachel, 22–23, 142, 144

Burke, Edmund, 116, 118, 129 Reflections on the Revolution in France, 118 Burney, Frances, 3, 5, 7, 15, 17, 18, 20–22, 29, 32, 38, 39–41, 48–65, 70, 73, 77, 84, 109, 114, 121, 132–33 Camilla, 39, 133 Cecilia, 7, 18, 21, 22, 57–64, 133 Evelina, 3, 5, 7, 15, 17, 20, 22, 29, 32, 39–41, 47–57, 65, 70, 73, 84, 109, 114, 121 Byrne, Paula, 69 Burns, Robert, 13 Capitalism, 8, 12, 15, 24, 31, 33, 37, 89, 91, 95, 96, 107, 113, 117, 121 Concepts of dominion, 33, 113 Ethos, 91, 95, 107, 117 Justification of, 24, 27 Tyrants of, 96 Castle, Terry, 66 Character, 2, 12–13, 27, 29, 87, 89, 136–37, 141 Explicated in narrative, 27 And property, 2, 12–13, 29, 40, 52, 54, 87, 89, 136–37, 141 As product of education, 2 Charity, 19, 28–29, 43, 52–64, 138, 140–41 And disinterest, 19, 28–29, 52 And Lady Bountiful, 54 In Cecilia, 43, 54, 57–64 In Evelina, 52–55, 59 Chastity, 2, 37–38 As form of property, 2, 37–38 Chivalry, 116, 118, 121, 129 In Caleb Williams, 116, 118, 121, 129

176

Index 177

Civic humanism, 12, 23, 26, 28–29, 30–31 And disinterest, 28–29 And education, 30–31 And virtue, 26 Clery, E.J., 68–69, 70, 86, 106 Cobbe, Sarah, 7, 30 Julia St. Helen 7, 30 Davys, Mary, 75 The Reform’d Coquet, 75 Day, Thomas, 79 Sandford and Merton, 79 Dickens, Charles, 18, 138 Great Expectations, 18 Dickenson, Donna, 6 Disinterest, 3, 12–32, 87–89, 114, 117–18, 132–39 Association with women, 20–21 In Austen, 139–46 And civic humanism 12, 23, 26, 28 As comprehensive gaze, 26 Dematerialization of, 26 Democratization of, 25–26, 139 And the domestic woman 3 And education, 30, 139 The feminization of, 3, 13, 20–24, 26, 27, 29–30 Gothic novel and, 87–114 See also, Heroine of As ideology, 14 Intellectual history of, 23–32 Paradox of, 28 And property relations, 21, 89, 135–36 Reconceptualization of, 25–26 And sensibility, 28–29 And separate spheres ideology, 21–22, 26 And subjectivity, 25–26, 28, 139 Under siege, 23–25 Disinterest, Heroine of, 4–5, 7, 12–38, 65–70, 81, 85, 87–88, 118–20, 138, 139, 141–48 As bridge to modern ideals of self, 4–5, 13, 21

Defined 7, 29 History of, 4–5, 21–29 In modern scholarship, 13, 14, 21–23 Represented by kneeling, 15–19 Dolin, Tim, 87 Dominion, 114 Absolute, 114 Conditional, 114 Doody, Margaret Anne, 89 Enlightenment selfhood, 89 Eagleton, Terry, 28 Edgeworth, Maria, 79 Belinda, 79 Education, 2, 12, 20, 23, 29, 30–32, 69, 72–73, 75–76, 84, 88, 90, 99, 109, 111–12, 116–17, 119–21, 125, 132–37, 145, 147 Aristocratic, 23, 29, 30–31, 136–38, 139, 145 As bequest, 90, 119 And civic humanism, 12, 23, 30–31 As commodity, 125, 132 And disinterest, 30 Experiential, 99 As labor, 109 Lockean theories of, 31, 109 Proper, 32, 69, 72–73, 76, 84, 109 As property, 75–76, 125, 132–33 Eliot, George, 18, 22 Felix Holt, 22 Middlemarch, 18 Ellis, Sarah Stickney, 146–47 Extinction burst, 86–7 Fenwick, Eliza, 5, 7, 20, 30, 100, 125, 132, 145 Secresy, 5, 7, 20, 30, 100, 125, 132, 145 Ferguson, Frances, 2, 75–76, 89–91, 122, 128, 131 And education as property, 2 On memory, 128, 131

178

Index

On narrative form, 89 On pure history, 90–91, 122 Feudalism, 15–16, 91–92, 95, 103, 107, 114, 115 And fealty, 115 And investiture, 15–16 Ideologies of, 95, 107 And property, 15, 91–92, 103, 114 In plot, 115 Fielding, Henry, 6, 32 On Pamela, 32 Tom Jones, 6 Filmer, Sir Robert, 135 Fordyce, James, 74 Gilligan, Carol, 28 Godwin, William, 19, 70, 116–17, 119–38 Caleb Williams, 116, 119–24, 128–36 Enquiry into Political Justice, 116 Gordon, Robert W., 2 Grimshaw, Jean, 27 Habakkuk, H.J., 8, 11, 73, 19–21, 26–28 Haggerty, George, 71, 112 Harrington, James, 12 Hays, Mary, 17, 119–20, 123, 133–34, 137 Victim of Prejudice, 17, 119–20, 123, 133–34, 137 Heir, 6, 10, 48, 137 Collateral, 10 Indulged, 48 In literature, 6, 137 Heiress, 7, 89, 17 Hirschman, Albert, 24 Hobbes, Thomas, 4, 8, 11, 12, 24, 75 Hogle, Jerrold, 121 Homage, 15–17 Homes, Henry, 86–87 Honoré, A.M., 113 Hook, Theodore, 13 Horror, 88, 98, 101, 103–112

Hume, David, 24, 88–9, 127 Treatise of Human Nature, 127 Hunt, Lynn, 11 Hutcheson, Frances, 92 Identity, 1, 2, 4, 12, 15, 31, 87–89, 116–32, 139 As birthright, 116, 122–3 Civic humanist theories, 31 Contractual theories of, 116, 123 Dematerialized, 117 And disinterest, 139 And inheritance, 2–29 Lockean theories of, 31 And memory, 15, 88–89, 116–32 Modernized, 139 In relationship to property, 1–2, 4, 12, 87 Ideology, Definitions, 13 Inchbald, Elizabeth, 7, 18, 30, 65–85, 109 A Simple Story, 7, 18, 30, 65–85, 109 Inheritance, 2–8, 18, 20–23, 26–29, 86, 105, 114, 117, 128, 139 Interests, 22–29, 133 as theory of human behavior, 23–29 Investiture, 15–17, 91, 107 Jacobson, Howard, 13 Johnson, Claudia, 118 Johnson, Nancy, 124 Klekar, Cynthia, 22 La Rochefoucauld, 24–25 Landscape, 103 Lennox, Charlotte, 4, 20, 100, 109, 111, 131 Female Quixote, 20, 100, 109, 111, 131 Levine, George, 7, 14–15, 16–17, 28

Index 179

Locke, John, 2, 8, 11, 12, 19, 79, 88–89, 109, 122–24, 135–36, 145 Affective economy and, 41–45 Associationism, 122–3, 136 Education and, 109 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 89 Labor theory, 2, 89–90 Memory theory, 89–90 Second Treatise of Government, 12, 89–90 Some Thoughts Concerning Education, 79, 89 London, April, 6 Lott, Anna, 69

OED, 7, 12, 13, 16 definition of heir, 7 definition of peculiar, 12–13, 16 Osland, Dianne, 66

Mandeville, Thomas, 24–25, 92 Memory, 15–16, 89–102, 103–7, 104, 107, 111–13, 116, 127–31 Circumstantial, 131 Creative, 102 And disinterest, 92–102 Enlightenment, 89–90 And pedagogy, 88–102, 104 Premodern or testimonial, 107 And property, 107, 89, 112–13 Retrospective bias in, 127–131 Romantic, 90, 116, 124 Servants and, 107 McKeon, Michel, 2, 24–26, 30–31, 140 Miles, Robert, 80, 118 Mortensen, Peter, 69 Mortmain, 87

Parsons, Eliza, 29–30 Lucy, 29–30 Passions, theories of the, 23–24 Pamela, 3, 15, 18, 20, 32–38 As originary Heroine of Disinterest, 32–38 Patriarchy, 124, 135 Pedagogues, 109–10 Pell, Nancy, 22 Perry, Ruth, 5, 10, 11, 21 Piety, filial, 109–10, 114, 117 Pocock, J.G.A., 12, 23 Pompadour, Madame de, 25 Poovey, Mary, 25–26, 112 Property, 1–2, 33–34, 37–38, 69, 81, 113, 86–90, 104–5, 125, 133, 135 Proprietorship, 1–2, 7, 12–13 Aristocratic ideologies of, 87 And agency, 7 “bundle of sticks” theory, 33, 81, 113 Capitalist ideologies of, 89 As fate, 104 And identity, 1–2, 12–13 Intellectual, 89–90, 125, 133 Justifying systems of, 27 New forms of, 1–2, 87 Of self, see self-possession Propriety, 12–13

Nagel, Thomas, 140 Narrative, 26–28, 89, 116–18, 123–33 Conventions, 129 And disinterest, 26–28 And memory, 89 Politics of, 117–18 Restrospective, 123 And subjectivity, 7, 116–17 Norton, Rictor, 112

Radcliffe, Ann, 4, 7, 17–19, 20, 30, 38, 69, 85–105, 94–115, 109, 121–26, 133 The Italian, 87–88, 94, 95, 97, 103–115 Mysteries of Udolpho, 4, 7, 17–18, 30, 87–88, 94–115, 121, 122, 126, 133 A Sicilian Romance, 109 Recollection, see memory

180

Index

Reeve, Clara, 5, 86, 96, 107 And Old English Baron, 5, 86, 96, 107 Richardson, Alan, 66, 112 Richardson, Samuel, 5, 7, 12, 15, 17, 20, 23, 109, 115, 119, 120, 121, 133–34, 145 Clarissa, 5, 7, 12, 15, 17, 109, 115, 119, 120, 121 Pamela, 20, 23, 119, 133–34, 145 Robinson, Mary, 129, 125–31 Walsingham, 125–31 Rose, Carol, 27–28, 33, 135–36 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 27, 75, 88–89, 109, 111, 129, 135 Emile, 75 Roy, Parama, 22 Selfhood, see subjectivity Self-interest, 24–28 See also interests, theories of Reconceptualization of, 24–28 Selflessness, see disinterest Self-possession, 76, 91, 112–13, 114, 123 Contractual, 112–13, 123 Separate spheres, ideology of, 21–22 Shaftesbury, Earl of, 92 Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, 92 Smith, Adam, 24, 88, 92–96, 111–12 Theory of Moral Sentiments, 95 Smith, Charlotte, 29–30, 65, 109, 121 Emmeline, 29–30, 65, 109, 121

Spencer, Jane, 69 Spring, Eileen, 9, 11 Staves, Susan, 1–3, 6 Steele, Richard, 26 Steuart, Sir James, 25 Strict settlement, 8–9, 12, 69, 87 Subjectivity, 116, 139 Sublime, 126–27 Superstition, 104, 105–7, 111–12 In Gothic novel, 105–12 Types of, 105 Thompson, Helen, 3–4 Thompson, James, 21–22 Valihora, Karen, 95 Walpole, Horace, 6, 70, 86–7, 105–6, 107, 109 Castle of Otranto 6, 70, 86–87, 105–6, 107, 109 Williams, Raymond, 22 Wolff, Larry, 89 Wolin, Sheldon, 123 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 14, 15, 19, 20, 32, 37, 70, 74, 85, 105, 116–18, 123, 127–37 And contraction of desires, 37 And education, 32 And Maria, 15, 20, 116–20, 123, 126–30, 132–37 Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 105, 116–18, 123, 127–37 Wordsworth, William, 124, 126, 127

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